Computers are one of the most power hungry electronics in the home and office. It is a good idea to set a screensaver on for when you are away from your computer for a while. A good delay is about 5 minutes. If you have not moved your mouse or typed on your keyboard for five minutes, chances are that you are asleep, or away from your computer.
Benefits of a screensaver
Privacy: Having a screensaver on means that people will see an animation rather than what was on your computer desktop last. This is great if you do not want the passer by snooping or accidentally seeing highly confidential work.
Protection: One of the easiest ways to hack into a computer is when the person is away and the computer is still logged in. The hacker can use their power for fun with prank emails from your email account or they can use it for evil by downloading your personal information for blackmail or identity fraud. Having a screensaver on with a strong password can assist in detering such opportunistic attacks
Beauty: A beautiful screensaver can provide good eye candy and a good social talking point to break the ice with fellow collegues
Variety: Sometimes you just don’t want to look at the same thing over and over and the typical desktop is not too overly exciting. A screensaver can be set to randomly change every predefined time period to provide that extra variety.
Power consumption: Setting the screensaver to a less power draining display can save a lot of energy on your monitor. It doesn’t have to be completely black but the fewer the colours and intensity, the lower the power consumption.
Free Screensavers
There are many free screen savers available for download on the web. The most popular ones are:
Free Nature Screensavers:
Free Acquarium Screensavers:
Free Animal Screensavers:
Free Clock Screensavers:
Free Dinosaur Screensavers:
Help a good cause with Distributed Computing Screensavers:
Distributed Computing means performing a complex process spread over many, many computers in little fragments of work. When you computer is idle and your screensaver is on, instead of just displaying a beautiful image or animation, you can choose to help one of many good causes by using one of their distributed computing screensaver. They can range from trying to find a cure for cancer / aids to the most popular and original distributed computing background process – the search of extra terrestrial life. What you are doing is using your computers spare processing power to help compute and process small data blocks for a large project and once you are done, your computer automatically sends the results back to the main server and downloads a new data set to analyze.
How to install a screensaver
In Microsoft Windows, it is very easy to install and choose a screensaver to use. Simple go to the control panel -> display. Here you can go to the display properties window to select one of the installed screensavers to use. Most screensavers will have options to choose from so that you can adjust the time delay for when the screensaver comes on, how fast it animates, how randomly the animations change, etc.,