Search for the "Start Screen Saver" action and simply drag it to the left pane. Now in order to set a hotkey, move to the Shortcut Details tab and click the Add Keyboard Shortcut button, set the hotkey you wish (I use ⌃ + ⌘ + S in contrast to ⌃ + ⌘ + Q, which locks the screen), this will create a global hotkey. As my test, I can set the Grace period after add the following registry entry. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon. then Double-click ScreenSaverGracePeriod, and then enter a number in the Value data box that represents the password activation delay in seconds. I hope this can help you. Click "Start", type "regedit" (without quotation marks) into "Run" box and press Enter. 2. Locate the following key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwarePoliciesMicrosoft] For testing choose a screensaver manually in Windows 7 and check if it gets applied properly. Hmm - couple of things here. Firstly, if you change the theme on Windows 7, the screensaver resets back to NONE so you have to manually change that each time. As for the desktop unresponsiveness, I would do the following: Update to the latest graphics driver (from the GPU vendor) Update to the latest version of the DirectX runtime