This was one of those "WTH" downloads; I'd never tried an animated wallpaper before so I figured I'd give it a try. I had no problem installing it on Vista HP. It installs into Program Files and will create a Start Menu entry.

The fish are all the same size, they float up and down, left and right and pause at times. They all look the same, their tails and flippers (whatever their bits and pieces are called) move realistically. Tiny bubbles randomly float up from the bottom of the screen, and there's an effect of shafts of light coming through the water. All movement occurs behind the desktop icons and Windows sidebar.

Memory load runs about 39-42Kb. CPU is 14-18% which drops down to 2-5% when a window is opened full screen and covers it up completely. There is about a half-inch wide white bar running across the bottom of my screen above the task bar.

It's a cute little wallpaper, and I could see where kids would find it fun to watch.

DownTheShore  –  14 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+96)

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Now before everyone says "But why do I need this?, blah blah blah"... Same reason you place trickets or pictures on your desk or a "desktop wallpaper" on your monitor: PERSONALIZATION.
If you're not interested in todays giveaway don't complain, just don't download todays offering and check back again tommorrow.
I'm gonna give this a try. It may look quite good on my large monitor so I thank GAOTD and AnimatedWallpaper7 for the chance to at least try it out.

Beaks  –  14 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+74)

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A screensaver stops when you touch something. That is what it is meant to do: only activate when nothing else is going on and stop when work is started again.

This is an animated wallpaper. It looks like a screensaver but it is not! It is actually your wallpaper that is going to be animated.

The goldfishes are very realistic and of much better quality then the screensavers we used to get from AstroGemini.

While yo open your mailclient or Word or both or anything else for that matter, the goldfishes keep swimming in the background under all your opened windows. Beautifull!

Rightclickiing the mouse however doesn't seem to work anymore. I can not reach Graphics Properties while de wallpaper is on.

Zerebral Pony  –  14 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+41)

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This is apparently using the same techniques (perhaps some of the same code) as a previous offering. Almost no installation impact. The coding needs a great deal of improvement. On Vista, I had to run it in XP SP2 compatibility mode. There are very long pauses at program startup and shutdown where the screen is frozen--very disconcerting, although I'd have to do further tests to see if it's interfering with other processes or just the screen. It's setting but not obeying its options. It tried to mess with Explorer's memory, which I blocked. Like some others, I get the bubbles but no fish (the earlier offering worked OK). Like the earlier offering, near zero CPU utilization. It does restore the wallpaper on exit. No multi-monitor support, but it can stretch across the entire desktop, although apart from distortion, you could have problems with different screen resolutions. It minimizes all windows on startup. It does leave Aero functional.

3Planesoft has a number of 3D animated wallpapers. They consume large amounts of CPU which consumes energy and probably interferes with Windows power management (sleep), but it's low priority so they don't interfere with your other processes. However, they turn off Aero, so I don't use them.

I use Xeric Design EarthDesk 5.0.1, which does support multiple monitors, but the animation is obviously much slower than you'll notice (I have mine set for updates at 1-minute intervals to avoid noticeable "jumps"). You need good and up-to-date video drivers; it's actually changing the wallpaper, which you'll notice if you have crappy drivers. I use an equirectangular projection on my 16:10 monitor, and a globe projection on my 4:3 monitor. I used Celestia to generate the starfield behind the globe.

Fubar  –  14 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+27)

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Very nice, but now I can't move my icons on the desktop ??

poullykke  –  14 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+26)

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