@BrianGel #43 I don't know what you're seeing, but up until the last two screensavers I installed from 3Planesoft, I have always unchecked that box and NEVER had the manager install or appear on my system anywhere because I've searched after installing the screensavers. So I didn't misunderstand your point. You took the time to tell me I'm wrong, but after using these for six years, I've not had that install unless I wanted it to.

@harpo2448 #40, I agree. If I had one nitpick with the overall installation it would be the same thing, though now, I just make sure I install them all into one 3planesoft folder, but it would be nice to have them do that automatically.

@Paul Bartel, #36: I think you misunderstood my point. I didn't refer to the native windows screensaver manager.

What I meant was that a screensaver manager from 3Dplanesoft is included in the setup and will be installed without having a choice.

You just opt to not start it but is is installed anyway. I would like to have a choice wether to install this or not. This is a choice that is missing. I checked several times. This is a fact.

Installed and ran OK but Win 7 suggested I change the compatibility mode to XP and the screensaver certainly looked better. It is a lovely screensaver. One of Planetsoft's best. (I have Win 7 64bit.)

This is a beautiful work of art. The install and activation was simple and the quality of the graphics and animation are wonderful. From the falling leaves to the deer ambling past the scene with the background music. I am not a screensaver user usually but this is so serene and therapeutic as a break between work that it will be a keeper for sure. Thanks to both the developer and GOTD for this one.

I've enjoyed these offerings from 3Planesoft both today as well as in the past.

I also like the "new" (to me, anyway, compared to previous screensavers from them) wallpaper feature. Although CPU intensive, it works great, and I like the way things revert back to my prior "static" wallpaper choice after the "Autumn Wonderland" exits.

However, I don't understand why 3Planesoft does not install their various screensavers under a common "umbrella" folder by default.

That is, this is their current default folder choice for their files (unless you manually change it during installation):

C:\Program Files\Ancient Castle 3D Screensaver
C:\Program Files\Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver
C:\Program Files\Sun Village 3D Screensaver
etc.

...but it would be better organized as something like this:

C:\Program Files\3Planesoft\Ancient Castle 3D Screensaver
C:\Program Files\3Planesoft\Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver
C:\Program Files\3Planesoft\Sun Village 3D Screensaver
etc.

For those of us who have many of their "screensavers" it would result in easier identification of the common publishing company for these products as well as an easier-to-navigate and less-cluttered "Program Files" folder.

Installed & ran this screen-saver without any problems. NO shadow's halo problems, NO error messages, NO Z-buffer problems & NO visual screen overloading (what???-you must have another taste) in my opinion !!! I am using mid-end, old computer - nothing special.
The screen-saver itself is very nice, but somewhat limited to seeing from only one point of view. When talking all: I liked slightly more screen-saver with moveable camera that shows us all things in stages, from vast points of view.
But as the NON-ad/spam/scam freebie, this screensaver rocks ;-) It's simply nice ;-)

Works just dandy on win 7 64 bit. I have a $50. graphics card and it looks really cool panning around. Stuff like this makes computing ever the more fun, in my opinion! Thanks GAOTD!

Love it, and the animated wallpaper is great too... I'm making sure to install it on all our machines before the giveaway is over.

32. @Tigrisan (26): you’re wrong, there is no way to UNCHECK such option.
Actually, it's you who are wrong. When installing Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver there is an option to install the screensaver manager. Because I already use the built-in Vista manager, I simply unchecked the option

This is a nice screensaver. You can set it to stop the rocking effect too. For Vista, that's the settings buton in the screensaver control window.

#4 I’ve never seen a screen saver that causes me to feel motion sickness before but this one manages just that. The screen “wobbles” back and forth as you watch it. Almost as if your monitor has been placed in a boat. I could not find a setting to turn that swaying off.

Most TV shows produced today (at least in the US) use camera rocking. Why? I don't really know, maybe to keep the sheeple hypnotized. That's why I don't watch broadcast and rent DVDs instead.

This screensaver is GREAT because you CAN control the settings. In Vista Home 32 bit the "settings" button is right in the screensaver control box.

Of course I turned off the shaking right off the bat. Couldn't stand it!! But the final result is a GREAT screensaver. Thanks 3Planesoft and G.A.O.T.D. !!!

Now if I only had a "settings" button to control broadcast TV !!

Like Simon, I also got a hit from Immunet virus checker which is another cloud-based checker.

Detection name: W32.execryptor

Path: c:\windows\SysWOW64\is-SKH5Q.tmp

Installed by: C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\Temp\is-ALB7G.tmp\Setup.tmp

AVG, however found no infection--obvious this is a false positive, but thought I'd make you aware.

This screensaver is beautiful. It installed and runs without a hitch.

>I don't have a problem with system slowdown even on my oldest computer: 2.00GHZ Sempron, 3GB ram Vista.

> I do not have an icon in the system tray constantly.

I only have one 'negative observation' - I call it that because it is more a nitpick or artistic critique rather than a complaint: At several different times a big white-tail buck wanders across the screen. He has a beautiful big rack but his coat is spotted with white. Guys, the adults don't have spots. *smile*

@Tigrisan (26): you're wrong, there is no way to UNCHECK such option.

#17 - Hi Rob, I've noticed that once you run either the wallpaper or the screensaver, the program puts an icon into your System Tray bar in the bottom right corner of your screen. This is a possible indication that the program is still running, even after you turn both the screensaver and the wallpaper off. And you're right - it does take up a considerable amount of resources, slowing down older systems like my XP OS.

Right click on the brown leaf in your System Tray bar and exit that program, and your system resources should return to normal.
Hope that helps.

Installed and activated on Vista 64 but now get error "d3d device has a non-zero reference count". I have repeated install and still get this error. Please advise. Thanks.

3Planesoft is a developer of high-quality screensavers. This one, however, is not one of their best by any means. It's a static-camera scene comprised of swaying, falling leaves, a few birds and some animals passing by. Nice to look at for a few minutes, but becomes boring very quickly (IMO). I much prefer the Astro Gemini type of 3D screensaver which pans around a much more realistic-looking scene.

What a beautiful screensaver. Thanks, GAOTD!

@mike, #21: Thanks Mike, for providing me with that information. Though I can still not harvest any fruits from it, it is much appreciated. I will have to experiment a bit I guess.

I do not have a 'Creative Audigy sound card' but I'll check mine anyway.
I wil update my sound card drivers though they are one version behind at the most (but there is a difference ofcourse).
I cannot think of any software running in the background that might do this (I already stated that I did stop bitdefender and superantimalware), but there are a heap of processes left ofcourse.

Thanks for commenting always in a reliable, knowledged and helpfull way. For me you are "Mr GAotD numbero uno". Thanks again.

3Planesoft has been making the best screensavers for many years now. I downloaded their Christmas saver in either 2004 or 2005 and have bought a dozen since. I've never had any major problems and their customer support is always great.

That said, for the complaints:

If you don't want the screensaver manager, UNCHECK that option during installation.

If you think you're getting too high a CPU usage, turn the graphics down a bit though I have to say, just shy of medium on the graphics scale, I never run over 20% usage.

I also don't see any significant usage with the animated wallpaper option checked. That runs around 1000K which is nothing compared to the 450,000K my Firefox program takes.

I'm running a two year old Toshiba with XP, a dual core processor and 2G ram. I have a 250G hard drive that is 3/4 filled.

I'm not saying it's a perfect screensaver, but would think a lot of the problems people are experiencing as far as performance issues can be corrected in the settings?

Thank you GAOTD for this beautiful, relaxation sftwr. Setting the camera rocking to 25%, gives good performance for me.

*** I wish the smoke from the church was animated.
*** Some Jews may not like to have a church in the back ground. I wish it was a castle or something.
*** I wish Some customization was possible - like changing the background picture.

I have every give away from this company and i love every one of them. They are eazy to install and save me from looking a boring screensavers. Well Done.Thank you 3Planesoft and GAOTD.

Maybe it's a false positive but I thought this was worth mentioning - Panda Cloud Anti-virus* instantly deleted part of the file during installation naming it a trojan virus:
see report here
http://lulzimg.com/i9/b564272a.jpg

Rob asked, "Would somebody explain the EASY way to kill any resource usage..."
I recommend the freeware Iobit Game Booster 2 -
http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

It allows you to 'switch to gaming mode'. This temporarily stops unnecessary processes which frees up a lot of RAM. Then you can quickly switch back to normal mode. It was designed to free up RAM for game playing but it's great for anyone that needs to temporarily speed up their computer. It's amazing how many processes are unnecessarily running all of the time. It tells you what processes it stopped and how much RAM it freed.

*Panda Cloud Antivirus is a free anti-virus program that unlike other anti-virus programs, it can run along with your current anti-virus. (Running two anti-virus programs at the same time can cause problems but Panda Cloud can be run along side of any anti-virus program.)

YIPPEE!! Another screen saver - don't you just love them!

I love them particularly because I know it annoys a minority of people who really should get a life!!

More screen savers please and keep up the good work GAOTD!

Love, Light and Peace
JC

#14: "... I get an “Debugger detected [304]“-error, and then everything stops."

Google came up with this from Microsoft: http://goo.gl/HxjUi

* * *

#18: "This is an absolutely beautiful animated wallpaper (not screen saver as advertised)."

It's both actually -- there's a shortcut added to the Start Menu to run it as wallpaper [...\Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver.exe /w], but the .scr file added works like any normal screensaver, kicking in after whatever amount of inactivity you have set. If you want to run the screensaver from a shortcut, run the same file without the "/w".

@#17 Rob
Oops, I also forgot about MSCONFIG.

Start, Run, and type "msconfig" (without the quotes).
Then click on the "Startup" tab. And take the check mark out of the box of the program that's giving you problems.

Tracking down and disabling programs that are excessive resource hogs can be extremely difficult and varies per operating system, like I said. You'll need luck, so good luck!

The Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver is pretty nice, though it's not super realistic [like some games] if that's what you're after. It also includes the option to run the screensaver as animated wallpaper, but, it disables 7's aero, so there's a bit of a trade-off. It uses/requires Direct X 9, & setup includes DXSETUP.exe along with a couple of small, needed cab files. Configuration gives you control over the usual stuff, though there's no fps option, & as it's loading it shows you the hot keys & their functions, which is probably expected but a nice touch none-the-less. Because the actual .scr [screensaver] file is small, with the .exe file that does all the work located under Program Files [or Program Files (x86)], you have a few more options available to customize things, e.g. running the screensaver from a shortcut etc. Using GPU-Z to monitor an ATI 4870 graphics card, GPU [the graphics card processor] Load approached 90% -- the 4870 is by no means top of the line, but it's no slouch either, so performance &/or screensaver/wallpaper appearance *might* vary a bit with on-board graphics &/or lower end graphics cards... I don't know if it needs the GPU to do a lot of work, or if it's just relatively inefficient, running whatever you've got close to full throttle with little or no quality loss -- other comments reporting 50% CPU use would hint at doing a lot of work, since for me Task Mgr reported 20% [i.e. the CPU might have to do what the GPU can't]. There's also a bit of D3D fine tuning you can do with many graphics drivers, & the screensaver's configuration lets you scale back the video quality & presumably the load required -- it's at max by default.

Installation is pretty straightforward, & you're given the option to join their mailing list along with the option of installing their screensaver mgr. The .exe file doing all the work is installed to the program's folder [~32 MB in 12 files], with the "Autumn_Wonderland_3D_Screensaver.scr" screensaver file (that's added to Windows' system folder) taking up less than 1 MB. You *might* get a couple of smaller D3D files added to that system folder as well. Registry changes amount to a key for the screensaver plus one for uninstall, & of course like most screensavers it becomes set as your default after install.

This is an absolutely beautiful animated wallpaper (not screen saver as advertised). However, it reverts my Windows 7 x64 Pro edition's graphics to basic instead of aero. When it first started running, it ran CPU at 12-22% for several minutes. Now CPU is running at 6-10%.

The beauty may outweigh the issues, but I must turn it off when doing serious work :)

I have skipped these offers due to the resource usage, and since I'm a gamer with a high horsepower machine, I figured I'd ask the obvious:

Would somebody explain the EASY way to kill any resource usage, effectively turning this little gem on and off - running in the background is not an option.

Thanks in advance, and thanks GAOTD and 3Planesoft.

Runs great and I am only using this two bit vista machine.

It'd be nice if companies offering screensavers kept in mind that GAoTD has visitors from the Southern Hemisphere too. Autumn in November, snowy Christmas, etc, don't apply to us.

I do like screensavers, ans woow, we get an animated wallpaper as extra. That's a good deal.
I know not everybody likes screensavers, but please allow people who do to enjoy it.

Astro Gemini used to be a kind of housedealer for GAotD, but I personally like the style of 3planesoft more.

The thing I do not like is the screensavermanager that you are forced to install. It would be nice to have a way to opt out. Astro Gemini used to come with a screensavermanager too, but after a while they lately don't offer it in a giveawaay anymore of grant you the opportunity to opt out, which peases me ofcourse. This would be a nice thing I would like to see for 3Dplanesoft too.

Now for the screensaver and wallpaper. As I said before I like them and sure autumn is just still fitting for these days. But I have a problem here.

I cannot run the screensaver nore the wallpaper. Upon starting the executables I get an "Debugger detected [304]"-error, and then everything stops.

That is starnge, I'm not running any debugger (well at least not any that I know of). I don't even have a debugger and I would not know what to do with it either.

Is this a bug in the screensaver and the wallpaper? Or is there anything on my pc not compatible? And when there is an incompatibility shouldn't that be made clear before or is that also a form af shortcoming of the screensaver.

I would love to see the screensaver, I know 3Dplanesoft makes very nice ones, but today my only chance is stating this phenomena to the GAotD-visitors, hoping anyone did experience this too and also was able to solve this.

I do run malware protectionsoftware like bitdefender and superantispyware if this could be a cause of this all (I tried shutting down both but this didn't help).

I do request some help here, it will be welcomed warmheartedly.

Another superb screensaver - as all from 3Planesoft :)
GAOTD thank you !

I so wanted to love this screen saver, too bad it suffers from some major performance issues. First off on my test computer it causes all shadows or anything that uses transparency on the desktop to appear with the dark halo effect. Secondly Aero is not supported, Windows 7 switches to the Windows Basic theme due to incompatibility. As noted by another comment, the screen saver's process is using 50% of a quad core processor, which is unacceptable for a background process let alone an animated wallpaper. Although this wallpaper is very nice in it's production value it is not very practical due to performance issues. Hopefully 3DPlanesoft will work to improve the product.

Wow!! feel the breeze and smell the aroma. What a screensaver.

You can turn off the camera swaying in the screen saver settings by moving the "camera rocking" slider to the left.

(Addendum to my previous comment, above): By the way, if you like Avatar, you'll love this company's "Faraway Planet" screensaver!

I was so impressed by this company's previous GAOTD screensaver a couple of months ago ("Sun Village") that I actually purchased their huge package of all their screensavers for $99. In my opinion, most of their screensavers (about 75% of them) are the very best ones anywhere. The 3D renderings are really amazing and run smooth as silk. I have NO regrets about having bought their big package of all their screensavers and look forward to watching them for a few minutes every day. I haven't tried running their animated wallpapers, nor do I have my sound on when the screensavers are running, so I have no opinion about those. I'm running Win 7 64-bit. This is a really nice GAOTD! Thank you!

A great looking screen saver. The motion effect can be turned of in the settings. I have uninstalled the software now as it sat at over 60% cpu resources whilst running in the background.

under settings there is a setting for camera rocking. if you turn it off it will stop that wobbling feeling

Hi Kathy, you'll find all the screensavers will work for a short time then a large nag screen appears asking you to register the product.

Thumbs up for todays screensaver though. I do think they should change the name from screensaver to somethng like chill out saver or relaxation scenery, or something along those lines.

I've never seen a screen saver that causes me to feel motion sickness before but this one manages just that. The screen "wobbles" back and forth as you watch it. Almost as if your monitor has been placed in a boat. I could not find a setting to turn that swaying off.
The computer i installed this on is an older XP SP3 system with a 2.6 processor and 2 gigs of RAM, however the CPU usage shot up to 94% and pretty much stayed there. Newer computers with faster processors will probably be better off but this screen saver is certainly CPU intensive.
Other than that this is a pleasant enough screen saver with deer walking by and whatnot. That being said however it really needs a way to turn off that "floating-in-the-breeze-monitor" if us motion sensitive people have any chance to make use of it.
Thank you for letting us try it out, That is appreciated.

I am having problem running animated wallpaper. The wallpaper is becoming blur while screensaver is running properly. I am using windows 7 home premium 32-bit

Hello,
Autumn Wonderland 3D Screensaver is really something !
It's running pretty well here and I had no problems with installation or activation...
Everything is great, nice colors, and nice music also. It says "screensaver", but we also get the animated desktop wallpaper.
This is really something nice to have... Thanks !
Autumn Wonderland is running perfectly here on Windows Vista Ultimate 64x SP2 and Win XP Pro 32x

Oh my goodness how cool is this!! I love Sundays. EVERYthing seems to be moving, not just a blade of grass here and there like in some supposedly animated wallpapers. Not a hitch with install and activate, on 64 bit Win7. looks like you can download others as well, no one asked me for money for the Caribbean one that I just downloaded too and it's running well. Fast, easy, cute. And for you people who want it to seem like you're looking out a window and have the realism of that, guess what. It's a computer screen, so it is allowed to be surrealistic. Price is good, especially if you offer a couple or three different ones for the 10 bucks. Ta Ta, have a nice quiet Sunday all.