Numerous users are always trying to blame GOTD offerings for everything bad that happens to their computers, their lives, and the weather. Some of the offerings can screw up your computer. The screensavers are generally innocuous.

There is a pervasive lack of rational thought when it comes to the GOTD offerings. Perhaps it’s due to helicopter parents who never taught their children to think for themselves; pehaps it’s just a bunch of people who are too lazy to think. Here’s an example: I recently installed a new version of my disk defragmenter software. After the first use, the next time I rebooted my computer, it told me to insert a system disk. If I used the same lack of common sense expressed here daily, I would panic and blame the disk defragmenter for having completely destroyed my computer. But unlike most of the people who post here, I choose to use my brain, I choose not to panic and assign blame when bad things happen, but instead, analyze the situation. A second reboot yielded the same result, so it wasn’t something transient. Next, I checked the BIOS, and it only saw one out of four drives. First, I only defragmented two of the four drives. Second, there’s nothing a defragmenter can do that would make physical drives become invisible to the BIOS (it could make logical drives unavailable to Windows). The BIOS can get clobbered by malware, but only by stopping Windows, it takes time, and the computer would become completely dead, i.e., the BIOS would be gone. The BIOS CMOS RAM can get clobbered, so I popped the CMOS/clock battery and discharged the CMOS. No change. Since the only visible drive was an IDE drive and the other drives were all SATA, the conclusion is that the SATA controller on the motherboard failed. That’s right, the computer can be functioning fine one moment, and a few seconds later, it can be dead. Components fail, coincidences happen. It didn’t have anything to do with the new disk defragmenter version which I had recently used, or the GOTD software which I had installed prior to the reboot.

As for Garden Flowers 3D, as with any screensaver, whether it appeals to you is a highly subjective matter. Different people like and dislike completely different screensavers. This one doesn’t appeal to me. From a graphics and animation perspective, it’s quite poor. For a DX9 screensaver, it’s terrible. After I get my computer problems straightened out, I’ll post comparative images with a years-old ATI Nature Demo, which has outstanding DX9 graphics, including plants, trees, water, butterflies, etc., and isn’t static like this screensaver. It will be some time before I post very much.