Wierd PC Problem (happening to anyone else?)Follow

I am currently running windows XP and the PC is set up (I'm not sure what it's called) so that after a while, it kind of puts itself in standby mode if not being used.

Sometimes I park my character as a merchant and go to bed for the night. Once in a while, when I check the comp in the morning, I see it's sitting at the Windows XP startup screen (where you click the icon next to your name to return to windows) which is very similiar to what it does after it's entered this sort of standby mode. The only problem is, every time you try to move your mouse toward the icon, it pops back to the edge of the screen. I've tried hitting every key on the keyboard and end up just hard booting (restartng) the computer.

I assume that perhaps the server went down or I got kicked off for some reason (although I have cable) and the computer went idle and then started going into this standby mode. Since I play EQ full screen, it probably has some wierd reaction to it.

Anyone else experience this or know of a way to disable Windows from automatically doing this?

Thanks

I've had the same thing happen to me. I usually end up target shooting the icon a dozen times before I finally can click it.

Thanks for the help and sorry for the double post.

The options (except monitor which was 20 mins) was set to never. I think it may have something to do with the generic windows screen saver that was on so I disabled that and also unchecked the password required box as suggested.

How did you "target shoot" the icon? I tried hitting everything I could think of with no luck.

Switching to a windowed mode and minimizing while being an AFK merchant is a good idea. When EQ2 is showing in a regular window your CPU usage will be very high, but when minimized, it drops the CPU usage to 2 or 3% most of the time.. so that means other programs will work faster/better and your CPU won't run so hot. I even played Half Life 2 for a while with EQ2 minimized in the background and it ran just fine!

I minimize all of my windows (including EQ2). Easy to do this by holding down the windows key and pressing m.

Then I turn off monitor, speakers, printer...everything except the computer itself and the modem. Sometimes I even turn off the modem! (oops, I'm tired...)

Only problem is other people in the house aren't very computer literate and think it's off when they wake up in the morning and try to turn it on, usually turning it off or forgetting to turn several things on and wonder why they don't work (coughprintercough).