Ok…so no, this is not about putting your new 52 inch LCD tv into a steel reinforced concrete vault with 10 inch walls buried 30 feet under the ground to keep it from melting down in a nuclear Armageddon.

We had a problem with one of our LCD tvs at work. This TV acts as a dashboard monitor in the hallway. It displays all of our program statistics to help us know if we are on track or not. It is set up to display firefox in full screen mode.

Lately we have been noticing some “Burn In” on the monitor. In order to save it from utter screen etching doom, I used the scheduler in Windows XP to do the following.

6:30PM – Kill the firefox dashboard
7:00PM – Start the screen saver
5:00AM – Start up the firefox dashboard – killing the screensaver

There were a few tricks I had to do in order for this to all work properly.

1) KILL FIREFOX
Create a job in the scheduler program. In the run field, type

taskkill /im firefox.exe

Set the scheduled event to “Run only if logged in”
Set the schedule for this event to be just before you start the screen saver.

2) START THE SCREEN SAVER
First of all, in order to start a screen saver from a command line, you need to use the “-s” option when calling the .scr file. For Example:

c:windowssystem32sstext3d.scr -s

However, you cannot just use this string in the RUN field of a new scheduled job. You must create a batch file (in my case go.bat) to do this for you. I created a go.bat in my c:windowssystem32 directory. That go.bat contained the screensaver call outlined above.

Set your schedule for the screensaver sometime after you kill firefox. Don’t forget to set this task to run only if you are currently logged in.

3) START FIREFOX
In order for this task to work properly and to kill the screensaver, you need to ensure that this task is set to run if you are currently logged in. Also, you need enable the checkbox: Wake the computer to run this task. This will stop the screen saver.

I just had our dashboard set as the default bookmark for firefox. Thus, when this scheduled task launches firefox, it goes right into the dashboard.

For those interested, you can play with the files I created by downloading this zip file:
burn_in_protection