For group deployment you should create single .scr file by following the steps below:
- Click “Create” button, which opens “Select Screen Saver File Name” dialog
- In “Save as type” drop-down box select “Screen Saver (*.scr)”
- Choose folder and enter file name. The best thing would be to use file name with less or equal to 8 characters, e.g. “mysaver.scr”.
- Click “Save”
- Click “Open Folder”
- Double-click screen saver file to verify if such screen saver works.
Created .scr file should be copied to appropriate System folder on every client, depending on OS version:
- On Windows 64-bit, it should be placed in C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder
- On Windows 32-bit, it should be placed in C:\Windows\System32 folder
Regarding Group Policy settings, start with a Group Policy Object (GPO) that is linked to the Organizational Unit (OU) where your user accounts are located in Active Directory. This can be either a new GPO or an existing GPO that may already have other settings you want applied to all of your users. Next, go to Policy > User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization:
- Enable “Enable Screen Saver” policy
- Enable “Force Specific Screen Saver” policy and for “Screen saver executable name” set full path to short (8.3) filename of screen saver, e.g.
%Systemroot%\SysWOW64\mysaver.scr - Enable “Screen Saver timeout” policy and set “Number of seconds to wait to enable the screen saver” to desired number of seconds, e.g. 300 for 5 minutes
This policy change will update during a regular Group Policy refresh cycle. From the user’s perspective, the options for setting the screen saver will be set and grayed out.
Be mindful that this is a user setting, not a computer setting. If you’re applying this to a computer, nothing is going to happen unless you’re using loopback policy to apply the setting to all users logging into the computer.
Further reading: