Looking for a program to defeat screensaver
 

On the Mac, there's a great little piece of freeware called Jiggler, which when running prevents the screensaver from turning on or the computer from going to sleep. Handy when watching a video.

Does anyone know an equivalent for the PC? I know I could mess with the sleep and screensaver settings, but I'd rather do it this way.

some programs can temporarily disable the screen saver when watching a video, check inside the options of your media player.

It's my wife's work laptop. She'll need to be playing some DVDs for my son on a long train ride, which is why I'm going for simple-as-possible (sure, she programs huge databases on mainframes, but she hates to fiddle with computers).

The DVDs play with whatever program Windows defaults to when you put a DVD in. Does that one have a screensaver blocker?

My laptop (Win XP) has different profiles which I can switch when I want it to do different things like not switch the screen off. I think it's under Power Options in the control panel. I switch to Presentation mode when I don't want anything to turn itself off.

yes.

tools > options > tab: player > allow screensaver durring playback

On a Mac you can just go to system prefrences, screensaver/desktop and turn sleep and screensaver off. You don't need any freeware.

Right. You can do that in Windows as well. I think the point is that the OP doesn't want to have to have his wife mess around with system settings to do this.

I'll check that out: thanks muchly.

np, but disabling the screen saver is so much easier.

Any media player worth its salt disables the screen saver when playing a video. If it doesn't then it was coded by morons.