My laptop times out too quickly and goes into screen saver mode.

How do I change my time -out screen saver control. It seems like one minute and then the screen goes black, then screen saver pictures begin. It's very controling and irritating. Usually if I press a button on the keyboard it will come back, but not always. Please advise.

With the PC switched on.

Sorry, an O/S is active even though the user isn't doing anything... as in - if they are pulling the battery they can't be working on the PC.

I have to say that the behavior of individual PCs may vary. Certainly a sudden power loss should be handled by Windows such that no operating system damage is done. I was assuming that users would realise the necessity to shut down all programs and save data etc.

I hope this works for you. It may be specific to HP laptops, even the model I use, and at worst for everyone else, just mine. But I shared the info just in case it works for others.

25/04/18 Update

So far every time I have pulled out the battery when logged in (and then put the battery back again) the display timeout has reverted to values I entered in the display settings.

I'm still not sure what triggers the display to revert to a short timeout. It may be the time of day...

15/07/18 Update

I have discovered that normal screen timeout can be restored by removing the battery after putting the PC into sleep mode ie pressing the power button. I am not sure but I suspect that when the OS sleeps there is nothing going on that a loss in power would upset. With the PC alive (active) that always used to be a risk and probably still is. So far using this method has not caused me any problems.

Pulling the battery recently with the PC alive made it give a blue screen at startup. My recovery memory stick restored normal operation, but clearly pulling the battery has its risks.

After much investigation it appears there is no correlation between the screen timeout and deleting the user temporary folder contents.

Thanks for the post... But could you explain what WITH WINDOWS ACTIVE means?

Just in case this helps anyone...

Solution: Pull out the battery with windows active.

My HP Probook screen can time out far sooner than the settings say it should. They are set to never, but it can go black after 5min idle.

I spent hours trawling the net and tried as many fixes as I dare, all to no avail.

Then a few days ago the screen went dead, not just blank where it would wake up with a mouse click. This was "D" "E" "A" "D", gone, kaput...

The only choice I had was to remove the battery with the windows active which I did. That brought the screen back... and it fixed the timeout problem *?*?!!

I have correlated the screen early timeout problem with deleting the user...temp folder contents. On clearing it out, the screen timeout seems to go wrong within the day.

I cleared the temp folder as a test, and when the timeout began, I pulled the battery again with windows active, and now the screen does not time out.