Lyte Byte

Vista is being packed with lots of new goodies, one such thing is the new Vista Screen Savers. But as most other things though the functionality has been coded, the options are not given in the front end for the user to change it easily. Last time I talked about how to enable Aurora boot screen in Vista. In the same way, If you are looking for the settings for new screen savers like Aurora, Bubbles, Mystify and Ribbons, you will get a message saying ‘This Screen Saver has no options that you can set’.

But by changing the values in the ‘DWORD’ for these registry values, you can change the settings of these screen savers. The registry keys for screen savers reside at “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Screensavers\”

Here are the new options:

Bubbles
1. Large number of smaller but non-transparent bubbles with black background.
2. Few number of big non-transparent bubbles with desktop background.
These effects can be achieved by adding entries such as MaterialGlass, Radius, ShowShadows, ShowBubbles.

Ribbons
1. Large number of ribbons but thin ones.
2. Thicker ribbons in larger numbers.
3. Very thick ribbons with few in number.
These effects can be achieved by adding entries such as NumRibbons, RibbonWidth.

Mystify
1. Larger number of lines.
2. Few number of lines.
These effects can be achieved by adding entries such as NumLines.

Aurora
1. You can change the setting to be strong or dark.
2. Faster or slower aurora effect.
These effects can be achieved by adding entries such as NumLayers, Amplitude, Speed.

For Bubbles, Ribbons and Mystify you can get preset registry at istartedsomething and for Aurora you can get it from canucky.net. For more options and what are the possible values for these registry entries visit the respective sites.

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