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VMware Products and Screen Savers
When host screen savers activate while a virtual machine is running, several
problems can occur:
- The screen may appear to go completely or partially blank
- The system may not appear to respond to keystrokes
- The system may appear to be hung with a blank screen
- The virtual machine's BIOS spins while in BIOS Setup or when displaying no
operating system found, consuming CPU resources
Some reasons why these issues may occur include:
- The virtual machine has a high scheduler priority and the guest operating
system is busy.
- You are running a guest operating system (such as Windows 3.1 or Novell server)
that has an idle-loop that does not behave well (the virtual machine competes
with the screen saver running at a lower priority).
- VMware Workstation automatically releases the keyboard focus once it detects a
screen saver starting. This situation can occur often, since a virtual machine
that has input focus has a high scheduling priority.
- You have the input focus in a virtual machine and leave the host machine for
some period of time.
Typing some keystrokes should deactivate the screen saver, although if it
cannot get priority to run, the machine may take several minutes to appear to
respond. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and waiting for the security panel to appear may
speed this process.
VMware recommends that if you are having this problem you should
disable the screen saver.
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