Monday, April 20, 2009

Enabling local Screen Saver for Remote Desktop on XP

In doing testing of VGA captures, I wanted to enable the screen saver for a local user session while i was using Remote Desktop -- rather than seeing the standard login menu.

To enable this you need to use regedit and modify the following key:
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\SCRNSAVE.EXE

This key value should have something like: "login.scr", all you need to do is change that value to another screen saver. Type: dir %windir%\system32\*.scr for a list of values.

I would also change the timeout key: ScreenSaveTimeOut value to 1 so that once you login from RDC it will kick in immediately.