How to start screensaver on lid close if external display connected?

Cont......

Finding the process that’s preventing the screensaver from working :

The thing to do now is to scroll through the Preventing Sleep column and look for the word “Yes.” If you have the same problem my friend had, one (or more) of these rows will show the word Yes instead of No. This means that the process that’s identified by that row is the one that’s stopping the screensaver from working.

As an example of what I mean, imagine that the “HP Device Monitor” row in this image had a Yes in the Preventing Sleep column:

If there had been a Yes in that column, it would indicate that the HP Device Monitor is preventing the screensaver from running.

Next, click the Information icon at the top-left of the Activity Monitor window:

This brings up a “process information” dialog that looks like this:

On this dialog, click the “Quit” button at the bottom. This will show a confirmation dialog that looks like this:

Click Quit on this dialog.

If you’re not comfortable with killing/quitting a process, here are some other things you can try:

• Once you see which process (or processes, if you have more than one) are marked Yes in the Preventing Sleep column, see if you can find another way to restart that process.

Before moving on, there are two things to do. First, make sure you look at every process listed in the Activity Monitor and make sure that none of them have a “Yes” entry in the Preventing Sleep column.

After you confirm that, you can remove the Preventing Sleep column from the view with these steps:

• Right-click the Preventing Sleep column header
• Move down to the Preventing Sleep item on the popup menu and de-select it

When you do that, the Preventing Sleep column should go away. You can quit the Activity Monitor now if you want, you shouldn’t need it any more for this problem.

Testing your screensaver

Once that column was changed to No, I assumed that the screensaver would work properly, but we went ahead and tested it to be sure. To do this we followed these steps:

• Click the Apple icon in the Mac menu bar
• Click the System Preferences menu item
• Click the “Desktop & Screen Saver” icon
• Click the Screen Saver tab
• Select any screen saver in the column on the left. For instance, I scrolled to the bottom and selected the “Word of the Day” screensaver.
• Just beneath that area, click the “Start after” drop-down menu and select “1 Minute”

After you do that, step away from the keyboard and mouse and let your Mac sit there. After a minute the screensaver should start. Once you’ve confirmed that it’s working properly, go ahead and set the “Start after” time back to whatever time you want it on.

Regards

Hi Mik290,

start the Activity Monitor by following these steps. First, click the Applications icon in your Dock, and then scroll down and click the Utilities folder:

Inside the Utilities folder, click the Activity Monitor icon:

This starts the Activity Monitor application, which looks like this:

After starting the Activity Monitor, make sure the CPU tab is selected, as shown in the previous image. As the Activity Monitor runs you’ll probably see the processes jump around in the view. This is because by default, the view is sorted by the %CPU column. To stop things from moving around, click the header of the Process Name column. This sorts all of the processes alphabetically. (You may have to click it twice to sort it in order from A to Z, rather than Z to A.) The nice part of this step is that the processes will quit jumping around. When that column is sorted alphabetically it will look like this:

What you need to do next is add a column named “Preventing Sleep” to this view. To do that, right-click on any of the header fields. For example, right-click the Process Name name column header. This brings up the popup menu shown in this image:

With this popup menu displayed, move to the bottom of it and select the Preventing Sleep menu item. This will cause a new “Preventing Sleep” column to be shown in the table, as shown in this image:

Dear Mik290 ,

This means that your computer is expected to automatically go to sleep as soon as you have closed the lid,

you can see which processes are responsible for sleep by using the Mac Activity Monitor application.

Cheers.