Setting Activity Timer Timeouts in Control Panel
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4/8/2010
The activity timer timeouts indicate how long Power Manager should wait prior to deciding that a particular activity source is inactive. This causes an inactivity event to be signaled. The Control Panel settings determine how long the inactivity event must remain signaled before Power Manager initiates a system power state transition.
Activity timer time-outs should be smaller than the system power state timeouts, but larger than the expected activity interval. For example, the system state timeout might be measured in minutes, and the user activity timer might be 10 seconds. This prevents frequent activity timer state transitions during normal operation, but the user may be inactive for 10 seconds before the OS notices.
The timeouts settings in the Control Panel are cumulative. That is, if each timeout is set to 1 minute, it takes the system 3 minutes to suspend as it passes through each intermediate system power state.