-will accept a \fBdpms\fP option. So, if you wanted \fIxscreensaver\fP
-to activate after 5 minutes, but you wanted your monitor to power down
-after one hour (3600 seconds) you would do this:
-.EX
-xset dpms 3600
-.EE
-See the man page for the
-.BR xset (1)
-program for details. (Note that power management requires both software
-support in the X server, and hardware support in the monitor itself.)
+to change your power management settings, then xscreensaver will
+override those changes with the values specified
+in \fI~/.xscreensaver\fP (or with its built-in defaults, if there
+is no \fI~/.xscreensaver\fP file yet.)
+
+To change your power management settings, run
+.BR xscreensaver\-demo (1)
+and change the various timeouts through the user interface.
+Alternately, you can edit the \fI~/.xscreensaver\fP file directly.
+
+If the power management section is grayed out in the
+.BR xscreensaver\-demo (1)
+window, then that means that your X server does not support
+the XDPMS extension, and so control over the monitor's power state
+is not available.
+
+If you're using a laptop, don't be surprised if changing the DPMS
+settings has no effect: many laptops have monitor power-saving behavior
+built in at a very low level that is invisible to Unix and X. On such
+systems, you can typically only adjust the power-saving delays by
+changing settings in the BIOS in some hardware-specific way.