That’s good feedback. If you file that as an issue on GitHub, that might get more traction. I’m sure you’re not the only person in this situation.

(disclosure: former Microsoft employee (now at GitHub) who knows the PowerToys team)

It's sort of filed already, you can see https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/3170 and the linked issues

That's stupid, there's no way to avoid that. If you can't do it in software you can do it in hardware.

I do it when working at home with a digispark that simulates a mouse that moves a tiny bit once in a while.

You could even place the mouse on a moving surface or something.

I think in the office locking a PC is very important but in a WFH situation much less so. Especially in my case where I live alone.

I have a paper weight I lay on a rock to keep Ctrl pressed. Useful when running long running scripts in background while I'm working on another laptop

I've had environments where the system was pretty locked down, but had access to VBScript: https://gist.github.com/valdergallo/0e05d9e0c90b7be77458

There's environments where you get in trouble for unauthorized USB devices. Of course, you can just have them emulate an allowed VID/PID pair and get away with it, but it will lead to a rules clarification.

For those situations, there are wobbling mouse platforms that effectively do the same thing as a plug-in USB mouse jiggler.

You don't have to plug in the mouse jiggler, it can be a separate device that hooks onto the mouse itself. The OS on the computer would never know about it since it's separate from the computer.

Agreed it's stupid, but it still remains a good idea to have a separate distribution without Awake.

Considering how much energy my work laptop burns on a daily basis because of the four(!) different security products, I am curious how Awake is where they draw the line.

"Security." Awake prevents your machine from locking due to inactivity, which violates PCI regs.

Doesn't every browser also come with this feature when playing (for example) a youtube video? Seems like the horse has left the barn.

Youtube is blocked on many corporate networks.

Any video will do. I hear having an open powerpoint presentation will also keep a device awake. Presumably Microsoft office is a mandatory install on such dystopian environments.

Ah didn’t know about PowerPoint.

> dystopian environments

Some places block streaming purely because it clogs the VPNs if they route everything through the in house infra

Depends on how locked down the security setup is. The more sensitive the info the worse it is

At my previous job, they locked down music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora because the company wanted to save bandwidth at the office.

But they didn't lock out YouTube, because sometimes YouTube had a business purpose. So people just switched to YouTube for listening to music, which used even more bandwidth. In protest of the ridiculousness of the no-music-streaming policy, some people even forced their YouTube to stream in 4K even when they had a 1080p monitor.

The blocking of music streaming was lifted within a couple months.