So, I upgraded my desktop at home recently to a machine running Vista. One of the minor annoying features of this is that it defaults to requiring a password whenever it wakes up, so if I walk away for half an hour, I come back and rather than just moving the mouse to wake it up, I have to move the mouse to wake it up, and then click my name to get back to what I was working on. Given that this is a machine in my house, and I’m the only user of it, it’s sort of silly to have that extra layer of security (and it makes it harder to check my email while baby-wrangling), so I decided to turn that off.
I attempted the xkcd method to find this, and wound up having to google to find the method: Control Panel–> Power Options –> Choose when to turn off the display –> Change advanced power options –> Change options that are not currently available –> Additional settings –> Require a password on wakeup: No. And that worked.
It worked… once. I set it to “No,” then deliberately put the computer to sleep, then woke it back up, and hey, no password required. An hour later, when the computer had gone to sleep on its own, I was right back to the password screen. And repeating the process shows the “Require a password on wakeup” setting as “No.” In fact, I would need to click “Change options that are not currently available” in order to be able to change it to “Yes.”
And people wonder why I loathe windows so much.