| Many of you like your system to shut down after a period of time. Some of you do not know you can set this. Hopefully this file will explain it all to you. | |
| What is Power Management? How do I use it? Using Power Management with a screensaver. Limitations of Power Management with our screensavers. |
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| What is Power Management? | |
| Power
Management is a Windows feature that attempts to save power. In reality it only
saves a few cents every month. It was a good idea in theory but computers don't use
that much power. You can set power management to turn off your monitor, hard disk and on some computers, even turn off the computer all together. This feature is for those of you who never turn off your machine. We have to strongly recommend that you turn off the computer. We turn ours off every night. Why? Because Windows is always doing something in the background. Eventually your system gets pretty jumbled. You need to turn it off to reset everything Windows has been doing. You will find that your computer runs much smoother. BACK TO TOP |
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| How do I use it? | |
| If you
really must use it... then you can get to it through Control Panel > Power Management
icon. Also, beginning in the year 2000 we will be adding a button labeled
"SET" in all of our screensaver Control Boxes. Clicking this button will
automatically take you there. Once you are there you will see an area with at least a "Monitor" and "Hard Disk" setting. If your computer is not shutting down then these are probably set to "NEVER." Simply choose for example, "After 10 Minutes" for the monitor setting. Now, whenever your computer has been inactive for 10 minutes the monitor will go black. The same applies for Hard Disk. Some computers will have the option to "Suspend", "Sleep", "Turn Off" and possibly others. BACK TO TOP |
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| Using Power Management with a Screensaver | |
| Because
our screensavers uses DirectX we have had a major struggle with Power Management.
DirectX is in short an entirely separate operating system that runs on top of
Windows. Microsoft developed DirectX to display graphics and play sounds better plus
many more benefits. Since it is basically a different OS, it is not compatible with
Power Management. Just recently (12-21-99) we figured out a way around this
limitation. It requires a little work from you but it is very simple. Beginning in 2000 we will include code for Power Management. Simply, we ask you to enter what you have the Power Management settings set to. So if you have the Monitor set to turn off After 10 Minutes simply select the 10 Minutes option. You also have to check a box labeled "Are you a Power Management user?" Once this has been done the screensaver will automatically cut off 10-45 seconds before the Power Management kicks in resulting in what is to be expected. BACK TO TOP |
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| Limitations of the Power Management with our Screensavers | |
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