Do computers dream of electric sheep?

[ShepherdOfChaos]

And if they do, how could you tell? How can you determine when your computer is sleeping?

What I'm looking for is how to check if the system has been inactive for a certain period of time. In other words, how can you tell if there hasn't been any mouse or keyboard events? How do screen savers get the this system status info?

Or, alternatively, is there an easy way to monitor when a keyboard or mouse event has occurred? I know you have to use system hooks to actually process those events from other applications if your program doesn't have the focus, but what if you just need to know when an event has happened, without even needing to know what it was?

Does anyone know a way to do this without the complications of learning how to set system hooks?

[Razzle]

The only sure thing I know about Windows Hooks is that that don't work systemwide with VB.
If you want to know, if the mouse hasn't been moved for some time, you can try this:

Private Declare Function GetCursorPos Lib "user32" (lpPoint As POINTAPI) As Long
Private Type POINTAPI
        x As Long
        y As Long
End Type
Private Declare Function SetCursorPos Lib "user32" (ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long) As Long
Dim cor As POINTAPI
Private Sub Form_Load()
GetCursorPos cor
Timer1.Intervall = 15000 
End Sub

Private Sub Timer1_Timer()
Dim cor2 As POINTAPI

GetCursorPos cor2
If cor.x = cor2.x Or cor.y = cor2.y Then

'Mouse has not been moved since Timerintervall

End If
GetCursorPos cor
End Sub

[ShepherdOfChaos]

Hey, that's pretty neat. Now if I can just find a similar way to deal with Keyboard events...