How to Disable the Screen Saver Programmatically

• Microsoft Win32 Application Programming Interface (API) included with:

      - Microsoft Windows NT versions 3.5 and 3.51
  

SUMMARY

Under Windows NT, you can disable the screen saver from your application code. To detect if the screen saver is enabled, use this:

   SystemParametersInfo( SPI_GETSCREENSAVEACTIVE,
                         0,
                         pvParam,
                         0
                       );

To disable the screen saver setting, call SystemParametersInfo() with this:

   SystemParametersInfo( SPI_SETSCREENSAVEACTIVE,
                         FALSE,
                         0,
                         SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE
                       );

MORE INFORMATION

When the screen saver is activated by the system, it is run on a desktop other than the user's desktop (similar to the login desktop displayed when no one is logged in). Therefore, you cannot use FindWindow() to determine if the screen saver is currently active.

Here are two methods that you can use to detect if the screen saver is currently running:

1. Get the name of the current screen saver from the registry, parse the PE header of the screen saver binary to get the process name, then check for an active process with that name in the performance registry.

   -or-

2. Write a screen saver that would be spawned by the system and would in turn spawn the "real" screen saver. The first screen saver could notify your application when the screen saver has been activated or deactivated.