Friday, July 11, 2008

Working with the screensaver

If you do not sign on to your computer after a specific amount of time, it will turn on the screensaver. Changing the screensaver and modifying its settings is not as easy as changing the screensaver that is displayed when you are already logged on. You can not change the screensaver of the Logon/Welcome screen from within Display properties as you would normally change a screensaver. The only way to edit these settings is through registry hacks. Follow these steps to change the screensaver as well as the inactivity time before the screensaver is activated:


1.First, you will need to start up the Registry Editor. Click the Start button and select Run. Then type regedit in the box and click OK.

2.Once the Registry Editor starts up, navigate through HKEY_USERS, .DEFAULT, Control Panel, and Desktop.

3.First, change the amount of time the system waits after the last activity detected before starting the screensaver. To do this, right-click the ScreenSaveTimeOut entry and select Modify. The amount of time to wait is stored in seconds. By default, the system will wait 600 seconds (10 minutes) before starting up the screensaver. If you want to change this value to something shorter, such as 1 minute, then just enter in a new value, which for one minute would be 60. Next, click OK to save your changes.

4.Next, change the screensaver that is displayed. By default, the boring flat Windows XP logo screensaver is displayed. Try something a little more exciting, such as the 3D flying Windows logo. To change the screensaver that is displayed, you will want to modify the SCRNSAVE.EXE entry. Right-click this entry and select Modify. You will want to change the value of logon.scr to reflect the name of the file for the screensaver that you want to use that is located in the C:\Windows\System32 directory. Because I did not know the name of the file for the 3D Windows XP screensaver, I had to do a search for all of the files on my computer that had a .scr extension by using the search feature in the Start menu and searching for *.scr, as shown in Figure 1-20. The name of the .scr files are usually very descriptive, so you will have no problem finding the right file. If for some reason you do, just double-click each file to launch a preview of the screensaver. After the search, I identified that the file for the 3D Windows screensaver was named 3D Windows XP.scr. One you have the name of the screensaver that you want to use, just replace logon.scr from the value window with the name of the file you want to use, such as 3D Windows XP.scr.

5.Click OK to save your changes, and the next time that your computer boots up, your new screensaver will be shown.

You can also use other screensavers that you have downloaded from the Internet. If the .scr file for the screensaver is not located in the Windows or Windows\System32 directory, you will have to enter in the whole path to the screensaver file instead of just the name.e, so you will have no problem finding the right file. If for some reason you do, just double-click each file to launch a preview of the screensaver.


FIGURE 1-20: Using the search feature of Windows XP to find the filenames of the installed screensavers.

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