Making the Work PC Less Annoying

Screen Saver

Who doesn't love the corporate marketing screen saver that you can't change because of the GPO?  That's it . . . ALMOST EVERYONE!!

My first approach was a just-live-with-it mentality.  Well, not really.  I just changed the power saving to turn off the monitor before the screen saver activated.  It makes total sense that we can change that but not the screen saver itself. *sigh*

Next was to attempt to update the registry.  Of course that kept being overwritten, so I quickly relinquished that idea.

The final step was very straight-forward.  I created a copy of the actual screen saver file.  Then I created a copy of the photo screen saver file and renamed it.  So now everything looks good to the configuration, yet I have the screen saver I want.  HINT: You can adjust a screen savers settings by right-clicking the ".scr" file.

Virus Scan

Common sense settings:

• Run during the workday
• Permit 100% CPU usage
• Do not allow settings to be changed
• Protect the registry settings
• Allow the user to manually delay execution

That way if you forget to delay the scan, it interrupts your work day while consuming all of your processing power.  Because that is the only way to ensure that a scan runs weekly. *sigh*

Initial attempt was to update the scan time via the registry shortly before the scan was to execute, then again shortly before I wanted the process to begin.  The scan did not take place.  There must be a timing issue.

So I ran Process Monitor to watch the registry.  I manually delayed the schedule via the UI and captured the changes.  Once that was in-hand a simple scheduled task executing a batch file to update the registry did the trick.

ENJOY!!