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Keep Your Computer ‘Awake’ with Mouse Jiggler

By Fei Lumbania on August 25, 2010

By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
August 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Raise your hand if this has happened to you: You’re on an airplane, watching a movie on your laptop, when all of a sudden the screen goes dim. Or you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation and your PC suddenly goes to sleep.

These kinds of hassles can happen after a period of “idleness,” when the system detects no mouse or keyboard input. Blame Windows’ power settings, which by default try to conserve power if they think you’re not doing something. (Funny how Windows isn’t yet smart enough to know if a movie’s playing or there’s a projector connected to your laptop.)

As you probably know, all it takes an occasional jiggle of the mouse to keep the system humming. And that’s the idea behind Mouse Jiggler, a free utility that “fakes” mouse input–and saves you from having to mess with Windows’ power settings.

Just run this tiny app as needed–say, before you start your movie or presentation–and click Enable Jiggle. Then take your hands off the mouse for a couple seconds. You’ll see your pointer start to hop back and forth a tiny bit–enough to trick Windows into stayin’ alive.

In some programs (like Windows Media Player), mouse activity like this can have the unwanted effect of making onscreen controls appear. For situations like those, enable Zen Jiggle, which does the “jiggling” behind the scenes, with no actual cursor movement. Clever!

Mouse Jiggler works with all versions of Windows; it requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 or later.

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Fix a Computer That Won’t Stay Asleep

By Fei Lumbania on February 3, 2010

By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
February 02, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - My buddy Doug had a problem with his laptop: After putting it to sleep (i.e. into Standby mode), he’d come back awhile later to find it wide awake.

There are countless culprits for this kind of behavior: an accidental swipe of the mouse, a scheduled system task, and any number of other weird settings that reside in Windows’ power options.

Doug spent considerable time poring through those options, trying to pin down the system’s insomia, but none of the sleep or hibernate settings seemed to remedy the situation.

As it happens, there’s another place to look: the settings for the Ethernet adapter. (Doug’s machine was plugged directly into his router). One setting in particular; see if it doesn’t resolve the same issue on your PC:

1. Open the Windows Device Manager.

2. Click the plus next to Network adapters, then find the Ethernet adapter for your system. (On my system, it’s called Broadcom Netlink Gigabit Ethernet.)

3. Right-click the adapter name and choose Properties.

4. Click the Power Management tab, then clear the checkbox next to Allow this device to wake the computer.

5. Click OK, then restart the computer.

That may or may not solve the problem, but it definitely did the trick for Doug. As it turned out, any kind of Internet access–either inbound or outbound–was causing the system to wake from Standby mode. But by disabling the Ethernet adapter’s support for that capability, the system should stay asleep.

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Keep Your Computer ‘Awake’ with Mouse Jiggler

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Fix a Computer That Won’t Stay Asleep

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