Tweak Vista Screensavers

Windows Vista is radically different from previous versions of Windows and comes with hundreds of new features. Aero, new explorer, powerful Start menu, powerful search, ReadyBoost, and Flip3D are some of the features introduced with Vista.

Along with other eye candy features, Microsoft has included a couple of good screen savers in Windows Vista. Though Vista lets you change the basic settings of these screen savers, it doesn’t let you change advanced settings.

Windows users would like to change advanced settings of native screen savers need to edit use third-party screen saver tweaking tools such as Idle Time Edit and Screen Saver Editor or manually edit the Registry.

Change Vista screensaver settings

In this guide, we are going to show you how to manually edit the Registry to change speed and amplitude settings of screen savers in Vista.
Though MS has not kept any options in the ScreenSavers menu, we can tweak these screen savers in the registry as follows:

Warning: Create a system restore point or back up the registry before editing the Registry.
Step 1: Press [Win]+[R] keys.

Step 2: Enter “regedit”(without quotes) in the newly opened Run dialog box.

Step 3: Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Screensavers

Here you can select the screensavers registry entry.
Aurora Screensaver
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Screensavers\Aurora
Create DWORD keys
*Speed
*Brightness
*Amplitude

Set the value of the above keys between 500000000 and 2000000000. If the above values are not working, add/remove one digit and give a try.

Users would like to enhance Vista and Windows 7 screen savers should check out above-mentioned screen saver tweaking tools to enhance Bubbles, Aurora, Mystify, and Ribbons screen savers. These tools let you increase or decrease the number of bubbles in Bubbles screen saver, set line width and the number of lines in Mystify, select ribbon width and number of ribbons in the Ribbons screen saver.

How to enable DreamScene feature in all Vista editions guide might also interest you.