Hands on: Find a more interesting screensaver

I’ve never been a massive fan of the Windows screensaver.

The ones provided by Microsoft are only marginally more interesting than a blank screen and commercial ones can be fun, but if I wanted to watch tropical fish I’d buy an aquarium.

Screensavers were originally devised to prevent phosphor burnout on CRT monitors, something I’ve only ever witnessed on old ATM displays.

With LCD panels there’s no real need for a screensaver, but we’re past the point where such things had a proper function and now they serve mainly to entertain.

From an energy-saving standpoint, screensavers are not a good thing. It’s far better to use Windows Power Management to put your PC on standby, or switch it off altogether, rather than contribute to climate change.

If you must leave your PC on all the time, you could put your processor cycles to good use searching for extraterrestrials or a cure for Aids.

Alternatively, you could use the Windows screensaver to run a slideshow of your favourite photos. Most people are aware that you can configure the screensaver to sequentially display a folder of photos.

To do this in Vista, open the Screen Saver Control Panel by right-clicking the desktop and select Personalize, then Screen Saver, and choose Photos from the Screen Saver pulldown menu. Click the Settings button to select a folder of photos and select one of the three speed options.

Both the XP and Vista Photo screensavers provide few customisation options other than the ability to shuffle the display order, though if you have a good-quality graphics card, you can use Vista themes and transitions.

You’ll need a sub-score of 3 for the Graphics category in the Windows Experience index. To find out if your hardware is up to the task, open the Performance Information and Tools Control panel – basically, if your hardware doesn’t cut it, the options won’t appear.

Picasa slideshows
If you’re not running Vista on a graphically capable machine, then Download Google Picasa 2, and the Google Photos screensaver, which is free, easy to use and provides a slideshow screensaver that goes beyond what Windows has to offer.

Picasa includes a default album called screensaver; you just drag and drop photos to include them. Once that’s done, open the screensaver Control Panel, choose Google Photos Screensaver from the menu and click the Settings button to open the Google Photos Screen Saver panel.

There are four visual effects to choose from – a simple cross-fade, wipe, pan and zoom, and collage. The latter displays photos with a crisp white border, slightly rotated and overlaid on one another to give the effect that they’ve been scattered on the desktop.

A slider controls the slideshow speed between 0.1 and 9.6 seconds and you can configure the screensaver to display only photos in the Picasa Screensaver album, or all starred photos.

As well as the Picasa application, the Google screensaver can display photos from any folder on your hard drive, from Picasa web albums, or from an RSS feed. In other words, you, and anyone else, can display your photos from Flickr, or any photo-sharing site that provides RSS feeds, on their screensaver.

Unlike a conventional screensaver, the Google photos screensaver doesn’t automatically quit when you move the mouse (though it does if you press any key). Mouse movement activates a slide-in panel with pause/play and next/previous controls. Title and caption information is displayed for each image as well as a link to the website for RSS feeds.

When you get sick of looking at your own photos you can subscribe to other people’s feeds. If you want fresh content for your screensaver there’s a Google Group for photo feeds, or you could try the Creative Commons photo pool on Flickr. Or, you’re welcome to subscribe to my Flickr photostream.