Friday, February 10, 2006
Why is my screen saver contacting the web?
Yet Undocumented Windows Feature ;-)
A lot of people are creating connected screen savers -- delivering dynamic content to the desktop. I'm a data guy and I love this.
One problem... more and more Windows users are installing personal firewalls that interfere with these well meaning dynamic screen savers causing the computer to locak up. The firewall pops an Alert window just after the saver launches. If passwords are turned "on", Windows will not let the user get back to the Alert window, computer locks up, and the user is screwed.
Our solution... the ScreenTime saver engine pings the Internet during installation, before the screen saver and firewall can lock up the computer. The ping occurs when the installer opens the Display control panel. We save the user's response (as "1" or "0") to a file named "ping.txt" in the screen saver's directory. If the the ScreenTime saver engine finds the file, it won't ping the Internet and saver is free to do it's thing.
If your saver is eye-candy and doesn't need to access the Internet, you can stop the ping by adding your own ping.txt file to the screen saver installer. The ping.txt file needs only one character -- a "1". Drop it on the "External Files" list box in the Content Panel, re-build your saver and you are good to go.
A lot of people are creating connected screen savers -- delivering dynamic content to the desktop. I'm a data guy and I love this.
One problem... more and more Windows users are installing personal firewalls that interfere with these well meaning dynamic screen savers causing the computer to locak up. The firewall pops an Alert window just after the saver launches. If passwords are turned "on", Windows will not let the user get back to the Alert window, computer locks up, and the user is screwed.
Our solution... the ScreenTime saver engine pings the Internet during installation, before the screen saver and firewall can lock up the computer. The ping occurs when the installer opens the Display control panel. We save the user's response (as "1" or "0") to a file named "ping.txt" in the screen saver's directory. If the the ScreenTime saver engine finds the file, it won't ping the Internet and saver is free to do it's thing.
If your saver is eye-candy and doesn't need to access the Internet, you can stop the ping by adding your own ping.txt file to the screen saver installer. The ping.txt file needs only one character -- a "1". Drop it on the "External Files" list box in the Content Panel, re-build your saver and you are good to go.
// posted by Brian @ 9:34 PM 
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