Amphetamine

Amphetamine is an easy-to-use tool that helps you prevent the computer from starting the screensaver, entering sleep mode, restarting or turning off. It comes loaded with practical configuration settings for advanced PC users, enabling you to schedule several types of automatic post-task actions.

Prevent screensaver, sleep, shutdown or restart

Once launched, the app creates a systray icon and runs there silently while remembering your settings, without any interruptions. All you have to do is specify the kind of PC power option you want to block between screensaver, sleep mode, and shutdown/restart. After the command is applied, the utility gets minimized to the tray and shows a balloon message to notify you of its presence.

Schedule emails, launch apps, or keep services running

As far as post-task actions are concerned, Amphetamine can be instructed to send an email to one or more SMTP accounts, run a program or execute a script, make sure that all services from a predefined list are started, or start programs only if the services you indicate are not already running. These automatic tasks are triggered when the PC user attempts to shut down or reboot the machine.

Configure services and SMTP properties

The preset list can be customized by removing any service from the list or adding new ones from a second list with currently running services. When it comes to the SMTP configuration, it's also necessary to enter the sender email address (must be valid), username and password (optional), SMPT server, port number (with or without SSL), subject, and one or more receivers. These settings can be checked by sending a test email. Lastly, the tool can be set to autorun at Windows startup.

Evaluation and conclusion

Unsurprisingly, it had minimal impact on computer performance in our tests, using low CPU and RAM. It silently ran in the background without hanging, crashing or prompting error dialogs. To conclude, Amphetamine facilitates a user-friendly interface for preventing PC shutdown and setting post-task actions.