It would be great if it were possible to ensure that the screen saver for the virtual machine was kept in sync with the host OS screen saver. Our company has a policy that if your PC is inactive for 15 minutes, the screen saver kicks in and you have to provide your password to unlock it. This is great unless you tend to do things in the host OS for 15 minutes or more at a time. adam
adsmart, If you just disable screen saver in guest OS and setup host OS screen server to lunch after 15 minutes - will it work for you? Or I misunderstand something?
Andrew@ Parallels, yup, you misunderstood. If you work inside VM as ordinary user, you may not have ability to change any preferences of the Windows. In this case we should generate fake events to guest OS to prevent a screensaver run.
Any progress on this? I'm in a similar situation where I have a screensaver in Windows XP that I am unable to disable due to group policies. Very annoying to have it kick in all the time.
I need some clarification Do you mean that VM is in Active Directory and Mac is not? I can only ask why Mac is not in AD? there is a lot of product that allows to change Mac settings through GPO http://www.centrify.com/resources/chalktalk_mac_os_x.asp http://www.macworld.com/article/56791/2007/03/activedirectory.html
The point of the request is to pass along to the guest operating system the information that there is activity in the host operating system so that a screensaver or other inactivity timer on the guest operating system does not trigger. As a workaround, I have started using caffeine.exe from Zhorn Software within the Windows XP guest, which sends a Left Space-Key Up event every 59 seconds. Something like this could be incorporated into the Parallels Tools suite. Ideally the events would only be sent if there is activity (mouse or keyboard) on the Host OS. This is not the case with the workaround I'm using.
