I use my PowerBook everywhere — including at work, where I am provided a perfectly functional Windows box to work on. One of the ongoing concerns of anyone who works similarly is security; how do you minimize the damage if some jerk swipes your computer?

So, having presented the background material, my pet-peeve every time I go through any list of common security precautions is screen locking. The little checkbox in the Security preference pane controls both screen-saver passwords and wake-from-sleep passwords; I only want to turn on one of those.

The thing is, my PowerBook starts the screen saver on me a lot when I’m still (more or less) working with it; when that happens, it irritates me to no end that I have to type a password, which ultimately leads to me turning the setting off again, even though I don’t want just any goofball to open up my PowerBook and start messing with my stuff.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. My preference lately has been to turn screen savers off completely and fiddle directly with the “Power Saver” settings on all my machines. For my PowerBook I’m going to try having the least CPU-hungry screen saver (which appears to be Computer Name) activate a bit after the display goes to sleep, and check that password preference. In theory, I’ll react to the display sleep before the screen lock if I’m still there. In practice, who knows?

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