Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!garnett From: garnett@cs.utexas.edu (John William Garnett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Burn-in fears (Real or Imaginary ?), Prevention ? Keywords: Burn-in, Monitors, Screen-saving, Insanity Message-ID: <1121@lovelady.cs.utexas.edu> Date: 22 Feb 91 18:59:30 GMT References: <2171@fornax.UUCP> Organization: University of Texas at Austin Lines: 69 In article <2171@fornax.UUCP> oneill@fornax.UUCP (Richard O'Neill) writes: >Some of our older NeXT machines have an after-image of the loginwindow >burned into their display. Its faint, but noticeable. I don't know whether >this was caused by behavour which is no longer exhibited by v2.0, but I have >noticed that at our site, running v2.0, loginwindow screens stay at "normal >intensity" for quite a while after logout before dimming to "reduced >intensity". Is there some way to > > a) Reduce the dimming time for the login window This question came up a while back (a month ago?). I don't remember that there was any response giving a way to set the autodim time in such a way that it affected the machine when no one was logged in. If you want to experiment, there is an IOCTL that sets the autodim time (and for that matter there is an IOCTL that sets the dimming level). Use "man evs" for more info. > b) Switch off the monitor when I want the machine to keep running > but I know no one will be using it. I too would like a way to be able to do this. Is there anyway (under software control) to switch off the monitor power without switching off the machine? I'm pretty sure there isn't any documented way :-) but that hasn't usually stopped people... > c) Have the login window appear in slightly different places on > the screen each time it is drawn. Interesting idea... You know one thing you could do is write a cron script that uses the screen dimming IOCTL to run every hour or so (if no one is logged in then dim the screen all the way) [someone has already done this, I can dig up the script if you want]. The builtin autodimmer only dims to 1/4 the current brightness - this doesn't really seem to be dim enough. Who knows, you might get burnin even if you have dimness set to zero (if with dimness 0, you can still see a faint image of the login window). Other people have written scripts using pft (think that was it anyway) to put up a black window covering the entire screen. Perhaps a good combination would be to dim the screen all the way and put up the black window (would this use less power than just putting up the black window?). > d) Replace the default screen saver with an alternative one. > There are some screen savers out there in the archives. Most people claim to have had problems getting some of them to work. One called LockScreen should be ready for 2.0 in a short while assuming I've been reading the author's posts correctly. >Thinking about it, has anyone had problems with icons (such as the NeXT >icon) in the dock burning in, and if so is there any way to prevent this >happening. good question :-) Maybe you could write an icon shuffler that would put your icons up in a different order each time you logged in! Boy wouldn't that add to the learning curve for the environment (laugh). > >Or is the burn-in problem imaginary, and sensible monitor brightnesses cause >no chance of problems. > I have seen several posts from people complaining about monitor burn-in... I doubt the problem is imaginary (in the usual sense of the word). -- John Garnett University of Texas at Austin garnett@cs.utexas.edu Department of Computer Science Austin, Texas Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com