tholen@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (David Tholen) (12/15/89)
I have two screen blankers, one automatic, one manual. I got the automatic one from some anonymous ftp site (sorry! I don't have that documentation with me, and I don't remember which one). The filename is SCRNBLNK.ARC. It allows you to set the length of time it waits for keyboard inactivity before blanking the screen; or you could optionally have a clock in a box jumping around on the screen every few seconds. And, of course, you could run the program a second time to remove it. I don't use it much because of what I consider to be a bug. I had it set to blank the screen after two minutes of inactivity. While doing an XCOPY operation to floppy, my keyboard was indeed inactive for two minutes, so SCRNBLNK went into action, blanking the screen, AND STOPPING THE XCOPY OPERATION DEAD IN ITS TRACKS. As soon as I hit a key, XCOPY came back to life. Not terribly useful if your job stops simply because the keyboard wasn't touched. Haven't tried it with XCOPY in the background; I presume it would keep running under those circumstances (heaven forbid that all background jobs get stopped by the screen blanker!). The manual one I wrote myself before I came across the automatic one. It's just a simple call to VioScrollUp; waits for a return before exiting. The only problem is that if the command line prompt isn't at the bottom of the screen, the cursor is gone. Haven't invested the time to figure out why. If I know I'm going to be away from the keyboard for awhile, I simply type BLANK at a full screen command prompt. A while back I posted a query about possible redundancy between the BUFFERS= and DISKCACHE memory eaters and the CACHE associated with the HPFS. Due to the overwhelming silence, I can only assume that either the question was so incredibly stupid that nobody could dignify it with a response, or that everybody else out there is just as uncertain as I am. Somehow I doubt the former possibility. Haven't run across any help from the on-line or printed documentation. How about somebody from Microsoft/IBM commenting on this? With HPFS, can one eliminate the DISKCACHE statement from the CONFIG.SYS file without adversely affecting disk performance? --Dave Tholen tholen@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
slh@fred.cs.washington.edu (Scott Heyano) (12/15/89)
SCRNBLNK is at mtsg.ubc.ca, and it is screwed-up I had the same problem when doing file transfers--the blanker stopped the transfer and caused a time-out. I suppose this has something to do with the blanker using a pop-up, but I wouldn't know.
ballard@cheddar.cc.ubc.ca (Alan Ballard) (12/16/89)
In article <10194@june.cs.washington.edu> slh@fred.cs.washington.edu writes: > >SCRNBLNK is at mtsg.ubc.ca, and it is screwed-up I had the same problem >when doing file transfers--the blanker stopped the transfer and caused a >time-out. I suppose this has something to do with the blanker using a >pop-up, but I wouldn't know. I'm the author of SCRNBLNK. It uses VioPopUp to blank the screen, and this does indeed seem to suspend the foreground session, at least sometimes. I haven't yet figured out a way to avoid the problem; any suggestions would be welcome. I've thought of a couple of other ways to do the blanking; but they all have other problems... Only full-screen (non-PM) sessions seem to experience this problem; PM sessions continue without being suspended. For anybody who wants the program, a slightly newer version is in the file OS2:SCRNBL12.ZIP at mtsg.ubc.ca . The original version worked only with OS/2 version 1.1 ; the new version works with 1.1 and 1.2 . There are some minor problems with the 1.2 version due to bugs in OS/2 1.2. There is a desktop picture program that includes a screen blanker; I think it has been distributed on this list. It blanks ONLY the PM session, as far as I can tell. ___________________________________________________________________ Alan Ballard | Internet: Alan_Ballard@mtsg.ubc.ca University Computing Services | Bitnet: USERAB1@UBCMTSG University of British Columbia | Phone: 604-228-3074 5356 Agricultural Road | Fax: 604-228-5116 Vancouver B.C. Canada V6R 1W5 | ___________________________________________________________________ Alan Ballard | Internet: Alan_Ballard@mtsg.ubc.ca University Computing Services | Bitnet: USERAB1@UBCMTSG University of British Columbia | Phone: 604-228-3074
slh@fred.cs.washington.edu (Scott Heyano) (12/16/89)
Does it (SCRNBLNK) only suspend the foreground session? So if I'm doing some- thing that will take a while and throw the session into the background, will it keep going?
news@cs.ubc.ca (Usenet News) (12/16/89)
seem to keep running OK. And the foreground does too if it is PM. From: ballard@cheddar.cc.ubc.ca (Alan Ballard) Path: cheddar.cc.ubc.ca!ballard Alan Ballard | Internet: Alan_Ballard@mtsg.ubc.ca University Computing Services | Bitnet: USERAB1@UBCMTSG University of British Columbia | Phone: 604-228-3074 Vancouver B.C. Canada V6R 1W5 | Fax: 604-228-5116