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Uh-oh. This sounds ominous! Why would a company that sells screensavers dis them?
Mindconnection sells satisfaction, not just products. We think many of our customers would
be better off without screensavers. So, we'll tell you why and let you decide if you are
one of them.
Before the advent of color monitors, you could burn the phosphors out of a CRT simply
by leaving text displayed. Today, you cannot do that. The original screensavers were
programs that blanked out the display. That's all they did. Because of the resource
requirements, you didn't find many screensavers in the days when 64K of RAM was the
norm.
The ones you did have didn't do much. In the early days of color, the
monitors weren't so good and the graphics cards weren't very powerful. So, you might have
your screen go to a black on black display or maybe a clock. Even when the 386 was the
standard, you usually had to turn the screensaver on manually. You normally did this by
typing in a few keystrokes that initiated a batch file. Many users, including the
President of Mindconnection, wrote their own screensavers in those days. It was pretty
easy to do.
Today, screensavers go far beyond black on black displays. The whole idea of a
screensaver is to prevent burning a single image into the screen. The likelihood of such
an event is remote, but possible, with today's monitors. The typical user doesn't need to
worry about damage from not having a screensaver.
It's cheaper just to shut your monitor
off, if you are the type who never shuts off the computer. Screensavers do move the images
around on the screen, and are like a form of insurance against an exceptionally rare
event. You might be more likely to twist your ankle falling off a ladder on the moon than
damaging your screen because of no screensaver (providing you have a VGA monitor or
better). Screensavers today are almost purely entertainment.
And screensavers are automatic--they initiate on their own, and call subroutines on
their own. Screensavers today do everything from scroll some text across your screen to
play full-blown movies, complete with sound!
Plain and simple, they hog resources. The DOS variants (Windows 95/98) suffer much more
from screensavers than does an operating system like Windows NT. Prior to Windows 95/98,
the situation was especially bad, because of the poor memory management inherent in
Windows 3.x.
If your machine never runs slowly, never crashes, and never sees an hour
glass, don't worry about your screensaver. However, if you are going to do a
resource-intensive operation, you'd probably better disable it. You can try a
screensaver and see how it affects your system. You may have resources to spare, and not
even notice the drag of the screensaver.
Today's screensavers don't reside in memory. However, the older ones--many of which are
still around--do. Those older ones are Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) applications.
This means they always reside in memory, taking up space other applications might want to
use. This can cause resource shortages (including CPU resource shortages) that will crash
your machine. You'd lose anything not saved to your hard drive. Make sure you don't get a
TSR screensaver. If you are buying a new one, it's highly unlikely to be a TSR.
Another way a screensaver can affect your system: it may execute during a critical
cycle, knocking out a program that is trying to run, say, overnight. Typical applications
include programming compilers, relational databases, and website spidering programs. If
you are doing any CAD work or graphics work, don't even think of running a screensaver.
You may have gotten away with it in the past, but most likely you only think you did.
Remember any unexplained crashes? Well, now you have your explanation.
In one of his (yawn) movies, John Travolta, upon hearing bad news, said, "It's a
joke, right?" That line almost, but not quite, applies here. You can use a
screensaver without ill effect. As long as you are not running anything that is critical or demands resources, you can
safely run a screensaver. However, if you run a screensaver on Windows 3.x/95/98, you do
need to reboot at least once per day to clean up your memory registers.
Let's say you would just die without a screensaver. OK, fine. Let's talk about OpenGL.
Remember the movie, Terminator 2? Or how about The Abyss? Those special
effects came to you courtesy of OpenGL--a very powerful tool that Microsoft uses to run
those text marquees you can edit from your settings window.
Don't run an Open GL
screensaver--if a normal screensaver is a resource hog, this one is a resource black
hole--unless you have resources to burn. Because OpenGL will burn them. The simpler the
screensaver, the safer it is to run it. That text marquee is not as simple as it looks
(the fact you can change it on the fly gives a pretty strong hint as to its complexity).
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