screensavers

Storm chaser

If you're a weather nerd, and in particular if you're fascinated by hurricanes, you likely love looking at storm photos. If that's the case, you should check out The Weather Channel Screensaver. This program will adorn your desktop with a multitude of hurricane-related images as well as your local weather conditions.

The program attempts to install a toolbar and a couple of spammy-looking browser add-ons when you install it, so be careful during the installation process if those are things you don't want. Once the screensaver is installed, there are quite a few options for customizing … Read more

Animal instincts

To be perfectly honest, we could probably waste the better part of a day online looking at animal photos. Cute animals, funny animals, ferocious animals...we find them endlessly fascinating. If you do, too, consider Animal Desktop Wallpaper Screensaver App. This fun program is a screensaver with a social networking component, supplying a constant stream of high quality animal photos.

Although Animal Desktop Wallpaper Screensaver App is accessible in the Display Properties menu along with all your other screensavers, it also has its own manager. The program comes with six high-quality nature images, but that's just the beginning. Clicking … Read more

Stormy weather

Thunderstorms can be beautiful and relaxing, as long as they're not the precursor to weather that's going to require you to hide in your basement. Amazing Thunderstorm Screensaver lets you enjoy sounds and visuals of a thunderstorm from the safety of your computer screen.

Once Amazing Thunderstorm Screensaver is installed, it can be accessed from the desktop's Display Properties menu just like any other screensaver. There are a few settings that can be adjusted: you can set the volume of the screensaver's sound effects, and the display mode for the video adapter can be changed. The … Read more

Kind of fishy

Fish are a popular theme for screensavers; the computer screen lends itself well to aquarium-like graphics, and screensaver developers have taken full advantage of that fact. We like this trend, too; these screensavers bring some of the beauty and relaxation of aquariums to your desk without the hassle of cleaning tanks and adjusting pH levels. Free Desktop Fish Screensaver is one of many such programs, and it didn't do much to impress us. It's not awful, but there are many similar programs out there that we like better.

The program installs easily and appeared in our Display Properties … Read more

Bungled butterflies

Spring is our favorite season and we happen to love butterflies, so we were excited about trying Free 3D Butterfly Screensaver. Unfortunately, the program did not live up to our expectations. Functional problems and poor graphics plague this disappointing program.

Our first beef with Free 3D Butterfly Screensaver was that it didn't automatically install itself in the proper directory for screensavers as most similar programs do. We had to move the file to its proper place in order to get it to show up among the options in our Display Properties menu. We were also able to access it … Read more

On the fly

We've reviewed a lot of screensavers, but this might be the first one that we've encountered that kind of grossed us out. Fly on Desktop Screensaver does exactly what the name implies, adding crawling flies to your desktop in a surprisingly realistic way. It would make an excellent practical joke on an unsuspecting friend's computer, or just use it on your own computer to periodically creep out your co-workers throughout the day.

The screensaver appeared in our Display Properties menu along with the rest of our screensavers, and all we had to do was select how many … Read more

Something fishy

There are a lot of fish-related screensavers out there, and we tend to like them; they're generally calming and nice to look at. So we were rather taken aback when we launched Aquarium Fantasia Screensaver, which may be the ugliest screensaver we've ever encountered. It's impressive, but for all the wrong reasons.

Frankly, Aquarium Fantasia Screensaver looks like the final project of someone taking--and failing--an introductory interactive design course. Where do we even begin? What we suppose is meant to be sand in the bottom of the aquarium looks more like beige Berber carpet. The "stones&… Read more

iTunes 10: Screensaver starts during full-screen visualizer

Some people are reporting an issue with iTunes 10 in which the screensaver starts while they are using iTunes' visualizer in full-screen mode on connected devices like HDTVs. Prior to iTunes 10, the visualizer would take precedence on the screen display, not allowing the screensaver to start when playing, similar to a full-screen video. Apple Support Discussions user "megadot" writes:

I have my Mac Mini connected to my flat screen TV. I have my screen saver set to come on after the minimum time to protect my plasma panel. Since upgrading to iTunes 10 my screen saver starts … Read more

Screensaver slideshow

Endless Slideshow Screensaver from Extreme Internet Software is a free slideshow screensaver that automatically searches for new desktop wallpaper online, downloads it, and displays it in your slideshow queue, so you always have new pictures to see. You can select categories for the program to search for, such as Nature, Animals, Cars, Girls, Men, or Cartoons. While the concept is interesting, we're not sure about the execution.

We installed Endless Slideshow Screensaver, opened its Settings dialog, and deselected all of the categories except one, Space. We clicked Preview, and the program opened and started downloading images, which it displayed … Read more