The advent of the screen saver was actually a way of securing your desktop in the office and at home whenever you stepped out for sometime preventing unauthorized access to your work. The term screen saver was actually a term used to describe the many programs that still utilized the windows-api allowing them to work within the framework of the operating system. The influx of today’s LCD displays are making the use of such programs a bit too redundant for they were designed for use on older CRT displays which suffered from burn-in where an image that was imprinted onto the phosphors themselves leaving them there forever.
Energy Star is another technology that allows the computer to monitor usage and turn’s of all unnecessary components effectively saving power rather than leaving the computer running while running the screen saver. It is indeed still saving power for the screen saver itself has been loaded into the memory and the only parts running are the graphics engine, and the power supply, all other parts (USB, cd-drive and the hard drives have been shut-down to lower the power needs of the computer thus saving power). If you love screensavers, by all means use them but for longer periods of inactivity, best set the computer to hibernate where you get it to power down and all your data saved onto the disk, ready for retrieval at the push of the power button which is more cost effective than previous energy saving programs.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 1:36 am and is filed under General, Information, Related Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.