Are Screensavers Useless?

J

jason2811

macrumors 6502a

Original poster

• Jul 10, 2006

• #1

Is it useless to use a screensaver? Is it better to just put my Macbook display to sleep when it's plugged in rather than having it go to screensaver and then to sleep, is there any point? Thanks.

 

Killyp

macrumors 68040

• Jul 10, 2006

• #2

Some screensavers do have a point. Mine is Apple's RSS feed screensaver that comes with OS X. Works a treat. I have mine pointed to www.somersetsounds.com, a website a friend of mine started up and I help blog on it.

The screensaver is incredibly useful for this because it means I can keep an eye on the blog without having to constantly go into Firefox...


The flashy sparkly ones have no purpose other than to impress your friends.

Putting the display to sleep will lengthen it's lifetime...

 

dpaanlka

macrumors 601

• Jul 10, 2006

• #3

Killyp said:

The flashy sparkly ones have no purpose other than to impress your friends.

Click to expand...

Well, the original point of screen savers was to protect CRT's from getting "burn-in" from an stagnant image that remained on the screen for hours and hours. Which is why it is called screen-saver; it saves the screen.

This doesn't really effect LCDs really anymore. They can get a temporary burn-in effect, but it goes away, unlike CRTs, where it was permanent. However if you have a CRT, it is still a good idea, yes.

 

ham_man

macrumors 68020

• Jul 10, 2006

• #4

Screensavers were meant to prevent burn-in, but that really isn't an issue anymore.

What I do is just have the computer shut off my displays after 15 minutes of inactivity. It only sleeps when I tell it to.

 

lamina

macrumors 68000

• Jul 10, 2006

• #5

I've personally seen 'burn-in' on a 23" ACD. Seeing that, I set my screensaver to go on after an hour of inactivity.

 

Killyp

macrumors 68040

• Jul 10, 2006

• #6

Most CRTs nowadays use high frequency flickering and higher quality phosphor matrixes (no I'm not just talking gibberish 😛 I work in a TV store). Burn-in is no longer an issue on CRTs. Plasmas do sometimes suffer from it though...

 

dejo

Moderator emeritus

• Jul 10, 2006

• #7

If you use the Folding@Home screensaver, you can help in the cure for diseases.

 

winterdude010

macrumors regular

• Jul 10, 2006

• #8

Well they kinda have use. In terms of a laptop, a screensaver takes less power than having it on constantly so it saves a little bit of power.

 

Killyp

macrumors 68040

• Jul 10, 2006

• #9

Surely a screensaver uses about the same amount of energy as the computer being idle, probably more?

 

T

TrenchMouth

macrumors 6502

• Jul 10, 2006

• #10

screen savers are a dying breed i think.

if it is tied to a distributed computing program, that is pretty cool. or an rss feed as was mentioned earlier. but other than those two...pretty useless if you have an lcd. but hey...if it makes you happy, it certainly doesnt hurt...

 

dmw007

macrumors G4

• Jul 10, 2006

• #11

dejo said:

If you use the Folding@Home screensaver, you can help in the cure for diseases.

Click to expand...

Proof that screensavers are not useless after all! 😀

 

dsharits

macrumors 68000

• Jul 10, 2006

• #12

Killyp said:

Plasmas do sometimes suffer from it though...

Click to expand...

Plasmas are horrible for that. I've actually seen a few cases where the owner was watching the NFL draft or something like that for only the two days of the event, and had permanent lines along the bottom and the side of the screen from the tickers that they show during the whole thing.