Any way to detect what is disabling the screensaver?

Question

Is there any Windows application out there that will determine what process is preventing the screen saver from becoming active?

Solution 1

Run powercfg /requests from an Admin Command Prompt. For example, mine printed:

DISPLAY:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume8\Games\Origin\Origin.exe
Playing video

SYSTEM:
[DRIVER] Realtek High Definition Audio (HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0900&SUBSYS_10438560&REV_1000\4&9793a48&0&0001)
An audio stream is currently in use.

AWAYMODE:
None.

Which indicates that Origin was playing a video and this was preventing the screensaver from running.

Solution 2

powercfg is built into windows and lets you control and view lots of power management settings.

powercfg -energy -trace

This will create a very detailed power management event log, energy-trace.etl. Open it with Event Viewer and filter log by Event Source: Kernel-Power, Include event ID: 62.

This should give you events that look like:

The application or service \Device\HarddiskVolume1\games\Steam\Steam.exe has overridden user power management settings with a code of 0x3.

The code may be different depending whether screensaver, monitor sleep, or another state transition was prevented.

Solution 3

Sometimes just changing the time on the screensaver (not the type) to something else, say from 10 min down to 1 and then back to what you had it before will allow the screen saver to function normally.

Solution 4

Thanks to W1N9Zr0 for pointing me in the right direction!

In my case, it was an XP Pro (SP3) machine so the "energy" switch was not available, However, the "devicequery" switch indicated that it was either the mouse or the keyboard. Once I switched from the PS/2 keyboard I was using to a USB keyboard, the screensaver (and other power options) kicked in per the settings.

NOTE: When screensaver was set to 1 minute, it would sometimes kick in so I knew it was working. Anything above 1 minute and the screensaver would never kick in.

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Comments

[Raystafarian]

Welcome to SuperUser. What version of windows are you using?

[Synetech]

The screensaver not activating could be caused by three different issues: (1) a program is specifically preventing the screensaver, (2) the mouse is preventing the screensaver because it is “moving” due to a hair on the optical sensor (or dirty ball) or being perched on the edge of a desk/pad/etc, or (3) a program or mouse is preventing the power-management options from activating, and thus indirectly stopping the screensaver. I don’t know of any programs that can list other software that is blocking screensavers/power-settings on purpose, but the mouse problems are easy to check.

[Psycogeek]

^ agree, have not seen a program that seeks out which program. Programs or processes, can often be stopped. When having the same problem, I set the screen saver (or other power options) to very very short, then test by starting and stopping things. Also some "devices" in the device manager, have "power management" tabs, those devices will give control of "allows this device to wake the comptuter" so when you run out of program options , you can move on to device options.

[Psycogeek]

infosecblog.org/2011/03/windows-7-screensaver-timeout Group policy, Flash holding it out, and Vmware & Powercfg overrides.

[Psycogeek]

doing a screen saver Preview , or using a program like the many small programs that kick it in directly pretentiousname.com/miscsoft/index.html#ScreenSave (screensave) can assist in discovery of what kicks it back off, or keeps it from occuring. that can save time.

[James]

There is no "GetThreadExecutionState()".

[Sanjay Manohar]

I get "The power efficiency diagnostic library (energy.dll) could not be loaded". Why might that be? (the Power service is started)

[candied_orange]

Incase this is driving anyone else nuts: To open energytrace.etl open Event Viewer | Click Event Viewer (Local) in tree | Action | Open Saved Log | open C:\Windows\System32\energytrace.etl Tell it to convert to the new log format. Works on windows 10.

[Professor of programming]

In Windows 10 just run powercfg /energy and a web page will be created instead.

[Slav]

I cannot find anything like that, please elaborate

[tdwong.star]

To me, this answer hits the bullseye. Coupling with Process Explorer from Sysinternals (docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/…), I was able to kill the process that preventing my display from going to screen saver & screen off mode.

[Martin Argerami]

Mine prints all "none", and still the screensaver does not activate.