At 09:10 PM 1999/05/14 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>OK, second message in a row, I just thought it would be nice to separate
them.
>
>Has anybody got experience in turning off/disabling screensavers under Win95?
>We run Prime95 at 40 machines (most of them 486'es, though) at school, and
>screen savers are CPU hoggers (I suppose... at least everybody tells me so).
>Two solutions I could think of (both ideally incorporated under Win95):
>
>1. Have Prime95 reset the screen saver every 5 minutes or so (possibly when
> it's outputting) to `Blank Screen'. Would need fiddling with the Registry.
>2. Do a call to mouse_event() or keyboard_event() (possibly hitting Ctrl, or
> any not-so-important key, or moving the mouse one pixel), preventing the
> screen saver from being run at all.
Prime95 already has priority levels that are settable. The default is lower
than screensaver, but you don't have to run at default setting.
Have a look at the readme.txt for Prime95 V18.1 (or any version at least
since
V14.4 which had command line argument -P settable 0 thru 5, where
3 is equal to screensaver priority and 0 is near the level of the idle
loop).
Especially avoid the use of OpenGL screensavers; these are very cpu-intensive,
and run at higher priority than remote (network) file access, for network-
based backup, for example.
Putting both intermediate files and the prime95 executable file on a file
server is a nice way to ensure work is backed up, updating executables is
straightforward, and space used is efficient. It does have the disadvantages
of requiring someone logged in unless the security configuration is unusually
lax, and presents a single point of failure. (When the server reboots, all
40 instances of prime95 stop but may appear to still be running until a
mouse cursor crosses the prime95 icon.)
An alternative is to write a script which normally copies the pq* files from
local disk to server space, at whatever interval you prefer. They get backed
up with the server, so if ghost wipes the workstation clean, you can easily
restore an exponent that's 90% complete. As we move upward in exponents,
this will be of increasing interest. The script runs when there's a logged
in user.
In general, if you'd like to automate a task in Win95/NT, take a look at
Winbatch from Wilson Windoware; it's very handy for some things. Another
possibility is Active State perl.
Ken
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