I work remotely for my day job and have been doing that for a little over a year now. It's pretty great and generally gives me some flexibility. My company benefits from it too because I am always at the office and ready to jump on an issue at a moments notice.



One of the very few issues I have with working remotely is that my laptop is still controlled by Group Policy, and one of the policies I have in place is to lock workstations with ten minutes of inactivity for security purposes. This sort of thing is very important in an office environment where there are a number of people that could potentially access your computer if you step away and forget to lock it.



I'm at home though, and the only other creature with me during working hours is my dog. She's pretty smart, but lacks the opposable thumbs to hack anything off of my company laptop. Because of that fact, I feel that my laptop is pretty secure if I step away without locking it all the time. The problem is that I can't disable that on my laptop.



No problem, I found a cool little utility that works in this instance. It is called Don't Sleep. It is actually designed to prevent your computer from doing the following:



Standby / Hybrid Sleep / Hibernation

Shutdown

Log off

Screensaver / Turn off monitor

It is a light app, so you don't have to install it to use it. Just download it and double click it to start. You can set your options and just leave it in your system tray.I have mine set on a timer during working hours so it automatically closes and my computer can lock and turn off the monitors at the end of the day on it's own. During the day though, my computer keeps me logged in and unlocked so if I have to run to the kitchen or anything else longer than ten minutes I don't have to worry about logging back in when I return.Do you have something like this running that essentially does the same thing? Is it free? Let us know in the comments.