Egypt screensaver, however, froze my system the first time I tried to use it. The second time it gave me a “loading” message that lasted 10 minutes. I uninstalled it before the third time.

Alex

To all of you who hate screensavers, yay for you, I happen to love them and not only do I have all 28 of 3planesoft’s savers but I have over a dozen of Magentic’s also and now the Egypt one I downloaded today. It’s nice enough to keep as well. So piss and moan and have your little tantrum all you want. GAOTD is here for EVERYONE, not just you.

The screen savers that are offered are usually very good. I downloaded the few 3Planesoft screen savers and liked them so much I purchased all of them. I consider that a good investment. I don’t use screen savers a lot, but when I do it’s because I like the content of the ‘saver. I’ve downloaded a few of the Astro-Gemini ones that I thought were interesting (this Egypt one among them). In addition, I’ve also downloaded some RIXANE INTERACTIVE screen savers as well as a couple from TERMINAL STUDIOS. I’m rarely disappointed.

This time, when I installed it I did what I normally do with most GOTD offerings: I installed (but didn’t run the app), then I activated it. With this one, the screen saver didn’t work. Specifically it did the same as #29 mentions above. It would say LOADING… and then revert back to the desktop (or the Screen Saver manager). However, I did go back and read the README.TXT file to see if I missed anything and it recommended running the ACTIVATE.EXE first and then running the SETUP. Well, since I had just got done running the ACTIVATE.EXE, I now ran the SETUP.EXE again and this time the screen saver worked.

For the most part, this is a nice screen saver. The only real complaints I have with screensavers (like this one) are twofold.

First, it’s something that I’ve seen in quite a few screensavers that feature virtual environments: The tendancy by the designers to put “lens flare” in at certain points. Perhaps all I need to make me happy is greatly reduced lens flare or perhaps an option to just turn it off. When I’m watching a screen saver, it seems to me that it is supposed to be as if *I am there* experiencing the scene as if it was real. However, my own eyes don’t have glass lenses and therefore my own eyeballs don’t have lens flare. To me it detracts from the illusion or the suspension of disbelief. Please turn it off.

Secondly, I wish that screen savers could have a built-in feature where *I* can select the music to play with it. Too many times (such as the 3D Wild Dolphin screensaver that came out here recently) the music is just too sickeningly sweet to listen to. Yeah, I know I could conceivably start my MP3 player with a bunch of songs that I like and set it to autorepeat just before I start the screensaver. But that defeats the purpose of the screensaver which is to start up after an idle time and do it’s thing automatically.

Admittedly, both of these complaints are directed at the screensaver makers, not at GAOTD. True, not everything they put out is my cup of tea, but most is and I cannot expect them to “please all of the people all of the time”.

Thanks for listening GOTD and thanks for any of you for reading this!