Skip to main content

Hi Folks,

A strange issue. I have a screen saver locked and I cannot change it on our clients. Right now, we have a profile for the login window to have a screen saver after a minute of idle time. The users when they are logged in, they have the same screen saver, but it is set to 2 minutes not the one. We want the logged in screen saver to be set to 30 minutes to begin with and allow our users to make changes as needed. There must be a way of doing this right? The screen saver for the login window needs to stay at 1 minute. I just cannot find an easy way of making this work.

Thoughts and feedback would be great. Thanks!

Hi, not sure if this is what you are looking for but the script to change the idle time of the screensaver is:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver idleTime 1800

This will activate the screensaver in 30mins.

You could probably run this as a login script on all computers, set to once. Then users will be able to set it to whatever they like.

Thanks for the information. Interestingly, it appears this allows us to change it to a maximum of 20 minutes regardless of the value I enter in. We still have an issue that the value itself is locked out. Since we use a login window setting as part of a configuration profile, it is more than likely, this is interfering with the login user's ability to change the value themselves. As it is, the login window's time out is set for 1 minute. Using this command, I can get the logged in user's screen saver to 20 minutes.

Never mind, this worked like a champ. I was doing a few things wrong, but we did get it working. First day students are back so a little crazy.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settingsAccessibility statement