Screen savers that were designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on monitors have come a long way. Today, Windows users have options to download thousands of free screen savers from the web and also tweak the default set of screen savers that ship with Windows 10/8.1/7.
All recent versions of Windows include a bunch of good screen savers. One can set or change screensaver by right-clicking on desktop, selecting personalize, and then clicking on Screen saver option.
But unlike desktop background, Windows doesn’t allow you set two or more screen savers at a time. One can use only one screen saver at a time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to set multiple screen savers and automatically rotate them? Yes, it’s now possible to set and use multiple screen savers in Windows with the help of tool named Random Screensaver.
Random Screensaver is a free program for Windows that lets you set multiple screen savers. That is, this tool lets you select multiple screen savers as desktop screen savers which shuffle each time Windows invokes screen saver.
In simple words, Random Screensaver automatically changes the screen saver each time Windows invokes screen saver after a specified time of inactivity. Random Screensaver supports up to eight screen savers and is compatible with Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and the latest Windows 10 operating systems.
How to setup Random Screensaver:
Step 1: Download Random Screensaver from here, unzip the file, and then run the setup to complete the installation.
Step 2: Once installed, right-click on desktop, select Personalize and then click Screen Saver to open Screen Saver Settings.
Step 3: Here, select Random Screensaver from the drop-down menu (if it’s not already) and click Settings to open Random Screensaver settings.
Step 4: Click Add button to browse to the screen saver location. Windows stores all screen savers in System 32 (C:\Windows\System32). Just browse to System32, select your favorite screen savers and then click Open button to add them to Random Screensaver list.
Step 5: Finally, configure other settings that are available and click Ok button. You are done!
Would you like to see different logon screen background at each logon? Check out Logon Screen Rotator tool. You might also like to know how to tweak the default Mystify, Bubble, and Ribbon screen savers in Windows 7 and Windows 8.
EHX says
If it lets you add screensavers that are located anywhere on your PC, then it IMO would be cleaner to create a dedicated folder for the screensavers used — in the user directory, or on the D: drive, or wherever.
Also, by renaming it, it should be possible to nest a copy of it (or multiple) within itself, which would allow you to have more than 8 screensavers in the rotation. The only issue (besides the fact that this setup can be quite storage-consuming) is that, if there’s multiple sub-shufflers containing different amounts of screensavers, the result is that the contained screensavers aren’t equally likely to show up. This could be regarded as a feature, however — by putting some thoughts into distributing the screensavers across the shufflers, you can have your favorite screensavers appear more often than the not-quite-as-good ones. Not sure if Random Screensaver already has a Weighted Random setting that already covers and/or compensates for that, but I kind of doubt it.
I like this idea, actually. If I end up with an extra hard drive, this will be my setup for screensavers.
@Chuck: It might be that the Launching setting does have a Time Schedule option, but probably not because, just like the Weighted Random, it would require additional configuration data, which I don’t really see any kind of fields for. Although, there’s the Options link right below it, so maybe that does manage data that’s specific to launching modes, which would make things like Weighted Random and Time Scedule possible.
Andrew says
This is very cool! Works perfectly! Thank You
Chuck says
Sure would be nice to be able to set one screen saver for the daytime(7:00am), and automatically switch to a different for the night(11:00pm). Win XP and Win 10.