Stop Auto Logout

Hi

I recently got a new laptop and I've noticed an annoyance I can't seem to change.

I set my screen to go blank after a minute or two of inactivity, but I can't 'wake' it using the touchpad like I could on my old laptop, does anyone know how to enable this?

Another annoyance is that it automatically logs me out each time the screen powers off.. and to be clear it's just the screen going off, not entering sleep. I looked in the settings (Settings>Accounts>Sign In options) and find the "Require Sign In" set to "Every Time" and greyed out.

I done a bit of reading and learned that for some reason (I cannot fathom) when using mega convenient biometrics to log in it greys out this option (??). And although I read plenty of people talking about it predictably there's no fix.. or at least that I could find. A lot of searches return a problem ENABLING the biometrics when a member of a domain, drowning out anything else.

I already done the usual of updating drivers, but there's no drivers relating to the touchpad at all from the Dell website and the Dell Update software doesn't come up with any available newer drivers, either.

Oh my Windows version no is 19041.264

One of the things I thought initially was if Windows was powering it off with the screen or something, I did check the BIOS and also the power options (Although I then noticed that they were bare on this laptop).

I just had another rummage though but can't find anything to do with touch pad/mice.

I also read about the screensaver thing catching some people out, I had already checked that.

One thing I have spotted is when the touch pad fails an error shows in the Event Viewer "An attempt to configure the input mode of a multitouch device failed." originating from MTConfig.

Information about this specific error or service is few & far between.

The laptop is about a week old. But I know there's no hardware fault because I ran the Dell fault finding thing, checks all your hardware at BIOS everything passes which made me think it was a Windows issue.

I suppose it's possible it wouldn't find anything wrong with it if it was intermittent, but this is the only circumstances in which it fails.

Yes I did a BIOS upgrade, I think it's 1.6 and was marked as "Urgent" so I updated it.

But I done something drastic and reinstalled Windows, eventhough I've done this many times I had a particularly painful experience (that I'm tempted to post about) but it's all sorted now and it's not done it so far so hopefully it may have been a bad configuration or something. Only time will tell.

I'm not sure what the laptop came with, it was something I never looked at unfortunately.

Caledon Ken said:

Not sure if you image your machine but I would start. Then instead of full clean you can restore a good working copy.

I probably would if I had the software handy, but it's been a long time since I bothered with anything like that.. in fact the last software I used for that was Norton Ghost! I'll have to check if there's any decent free software for that.

Brink said:

It sound like deleting or changing the DelayLockInterval time delay in the tutorial below may be what you are after to stop this.

How to Enable or Disable Require Sign-in after Specified Time when Display Turns Off in Windows 10

Amazingly this does work. I kind of knew it would be something as simple... but there's a bit of a catch I've already discovered: It works up until you access Settings>Accounts>Sign In Options (I checked to see if it changed it). Then it just resets the reg value back to '0', but I have a feeling that this is because I'm using biometrics to sign in that disables this option entirely.

In fact a simple change of a registry value makes me ask more questions about why biometrics disables this option, utter nonsense.