Locking a Windows 7 machine without a screensaver

You may have read somewhere before that Windows 7 introduced a feature wherein you can lock your PC without the a screensaver. So today we are sharing few simple steps to achieve this.

Literally IT administrators to want their machines to auto-lock after a certain amount of time and in earlier version of Windows enabling this functionality required a screensaver to be set. But in Windows 7, Microsoft has made a change to allow this functionality even when no screensaver is specified.

How To:

1. Right click on Desktop and choose Personalize. Now click on “Screen Saver” link to open Screen Saver settings window.

2. In Screen saver section, Choose (None) from installed screen savers and check the option “On resume, display logon screen”. Set the wait time and click on Apply button to commit changes.

Auto-Lock your Windows 7 PC

3. Now you can let your PC idle and after a certain amount of time(Wait timeout), your PC will be auto-locked.

Applies To:

Windows 7 Home Basic
Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows 7 Professional
Windows 7 Ultimate
Windows 7 Enterprise

— Updated 11/23/2009

5 responses to “Locking a Windows 7 machine without a screensaver”

legnaw

2009-11-22

doesnt work on Win7 starter!!!
W7S dont support screensaver, wallpapers…

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1. Author
  
  2009-11-23
  
  Thanks – The post has been updated.
Vasu

2009-11-18

Nice Find :)

Reply
James

2009-11-04

Actually this doesn’t apply to Windows 7 Starter as MS has stripped all the customization out of it. The “personalize” option simply isn’t there. Just thought I’d point this out as I came across this post while trying to find a way to get a screen saver to work.

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Shinji

2009-10-07

Oh… Nice. I’ll keep this one in mind for the future

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Windows Valley

Locking a Windows 7 machine without a screensaver

5 responses to “Locking a Windows 7 machine without a screensaver”

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