I am not responsible for any mistakes you have made editing the registry. Modifying/deleting/renaming a wrong value in the registry can lead to system failure and headaches. If you do not know what the system registry is then you SHOULD NOT touch the registry. You might want to consider a anti-spyware program such as Ad-Aware SE Personal Please follow the information posted here at your OWN RISK. That said have fun!

In this tutorial I will show how to un-hide your screensaver tab from your Display Manager. I needed to learn how to un-hide the screensaver tab on a corporate machine my father was using since they had it set to hide in their domain policies. It was only needed temporarily. I set it back to the original state since it was that way for a reason (probably security reasons).

Intermediate/Advanced PC users using the Windows XP Home/Professional Operating Systems that wish to tweak their registry for fun and to just learn.

You go to turn off your screen saver and notice the screen saver tab is missing along with some others. Some companies disable access to these options. In this case its the Screen Saver Tab in Display Manager. With the screen saver enabled you can set a password so when you move the mouse and turn the screen saver off it will lock you out of your computer and prompt for a password. Company sys admins will take extra precautions to lock down thier computers. Disabling access to change the screen saver or remove the password prompt is one of the changes they might make. They do that just in case a employee leaves the computer logged on. Well sometimes the pass prompt can get quite annoying to the employee and sometimes useless if work mostly from home with a work laptop. Here I will focus on enabling yourself to change the screen saver or turn it off completly. The will require you to have LOCAL ADMIN PERMISSIONS to the work computer as we are dealing with registry entries.

Its always logical to create a backup of whatever your modifying just in case you screw something up you have something to fall back on instead of making more work for yourself. In this instance its our registry that we need to backup.

1. Start Regedit by going to start->run and typing regedit in the text box.

2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

3. Click image to follow backup instructions. Image contains 2 steps.

   

1. Start Regedit by going to start->run and typing regedit in the text box.

2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

3. If there is a "REG_DWORD" Type Name such "NoDispScrSavPage" with a data value of "1" this will DISABLE the screen saver tab from showing in Display Manager. Change the value to 0 or delete it.

4. Reboot your system to ensure changes will be made.

5. If you are successful then you should now see the screen saver tab in display manager visible. If not then please create a new thread on my Forums and I'll get back to you.