Windows 7 screen shut-off

On my brand new work computer running Windows 7, there was a very irritating “feature”. Every few minutes, the screen would blank out. When I shook the mouse to continue, I would have to log back in to my account (CTRL-ALT-DEL and password) each time.

I played around with lots of power settings to no avail. Here’s what finally worked: the problem was that the screen saver was setting things off. It was very non-intuitive in my case since the screen saver was set to “None”, yet when I finally looked at the screen saver settings, it was set to ask for login after a five-minute delay, even though there was no screen saver! So, every five minutes, my computer screen would blank out and ask for my password when I shook the mouse. I turned off the option for login, and everything worked as expected  after that (i.e. no more screen blank out).