keyboard and mouse lock in windows 7 during simulations

Question

When I run long simulations (perhaps for days), I would like to prevent any interference by locking the keyboard and possibly the mouse. I have seen posts like:

Lock keyboard - Ignore input, leave mouse working

but I do not know if they allow a program to run in the background with the keyboard locked at the same time.

Can this be done on Windows 7?

I do not necessarily have to see the screen also. Can something like the old ctrl + alt + del exist that will still allow an application (e.g. a heavy simulation) to run while disabling input from keyboard and mouse?

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you press

Windows + L

It will lock your PC and the background applications will still work at the required processor level.

If there are other users they can log in and do various work while your job still chugs along in the background, it is up to you.

Just set a password on the account to stop people from accessing it.

Also you could use ClearLock without the need to Windows Lock the PC, and still set a password on it, while you see what is happening.

I am not sure if there are applications that just lock the keyboard, without locking the computer/screen.. but one could be written in .NET pretty quickly.