Monday, July 09, 2012

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream (NOT)

Have you ever being in the middle of a presentation and the screen suddenly drops into screen saver mode? Have you ever needed to run an application overnight and come back in the morning to find your computer in sleep mode?

It's happened to all of us or, if it hasn't, then it's only a matter of time before it does. So I had a hunt around for something that would prevent that short of making the machines not sleep or hibernate at all, which would be very power wasteful…

Found this for Windows…


It runs in the system tray, has timer settings if needed and can allow the display to sleep (or not). By timer settings, I mean that you can set the no-sleep period. For example, if you're running a 30 minute presentation, then you could set the no-sleep time to one hour, which gives you a bit of run-over time and automatically enable sleeping again if you forget to turn it back on.

…and this for Mac OS X…


It runs in the menu bar and has timer settings if needed.

All are free, need no installation, are easy to use (click to enable/disable) and can be set to run at startup.