We may not need screensavers these days to “save” our CRT screens from burn in; however, there are some screensavers out there that are somewhat useful. This guide attempts to provide you with a list of some of these screensavers.

Cities of Earth Screensaver

The cities of earth saver provides an educational approach to learning more about the world. Watch the screensaver as it takes you around the world and shows you basic information and location of some of the world’s biggest cities.

Download Cities of Earth Screensaver

slickr

The slickr screensaver pulls in random pictures from flickr and displays them on your screen. One thing to note is you will need an API key for flickr to pull in the pictures; however, this can be obtained here.

Download slickr Screensaver

Wikipedia Screensaver

The Wikipedia screensaver loads random pages from Wikipedia every 30 seconds or so. Features include:

• Configurable time delay between each page load
• Can automatically kill IE and Firefox browsers on activation
• Can be configured to kill any other program on activation
• Blanks the screen completely after a configurable time

If you’d like to learn a little more while your computer takes a rest, this could be a great way to fill your mind with information you probably didn’t know existed.

Download Wikipedia Screensaver

Folding@home

From the site:

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

If you’d like to help with research and don’t mind sharing CPU (and GPU) cycles to help, then this would be a good use of your PC’s idle time.

Download Folding@home

Looking for More Screensavers?

Check out 8 more screensavers here.

Which Screensavers did I Miss?

Did I miss any screensavers you’ve found useful? Let us know about them in the comments.

The screensaver takes your username and, in true Matrix style, delivers you a message:

Then it takes the name of the PC you are using… how smart.

I still haven’t found the white rabbit.

There are many options to choose from to personalize the screensaver to your desires.

For example: Pink writing and your choice of ‘console’ image.

Download Matrix Screensaver

The Cities of Earth Screensaver displays the earth rotating. As the earth rotates, it highlights cities and gives you basic information about that city–it’s a great way to learn where cities are and a little about them.

Download Cities of Earth Screensaver

The TwittEarth Screensaver displays random Twitter messages from around the world and highlights where the message came from. Each time a tweet comes in, their avatar is added to the map.

Download TwittEarth Screensaver

Want More Screensavers?

Check out more screensaver collections on Mintywhite.com.

Matrix in Reality

The Matrix

River 2

The One Ring

Lantern

Glow Bubbles

RSS Saver

A good friend, Ellarby shared this screensaver with me this morning and I love it. The screensaver is simple and simply blurs your screen. You can change the blur intensity and turn on grayscale. Grab yourself a copy here.

I’ve tested this in Vista and Windows Server 2008. I haven’t tested this in Windows XP yet, can anyone confirm this works? Works with Windows XP (SP3) Thanks JazzMastaJim

Download Focus Screensaver

Download Focus Screensaver

Check out more screensavers on mintywhite.com

24 CTU Display 3 (Widescreen)

A screen saver based on the one used at CTU on the show 24.Supports a widescreen resolution of 1440 x 900 and greater.

Ice Crystal

Fire Screensaver

Glowing Vista ORB Screensaver

Animated Glowing Vista ORB Screensaver.

Live 3D Earth 1.8 ScreenSaver

Realistic 3D Earth model will rotate on your desktop with photo-realistic colourful graphics and music (You can add/modify your own playlist.) Best for 1280×1024 resolution.

Glowing Windows Flag SCR

Animated Glowing Windows Flag Screensaver.

Heart on Fire

Windows 7 Screensaver

Windows 7 Style Screensaver, the upcoming new OS from Microsoft.

Flying Toasters

Just like it says, this is a screensaver of flying toasters.

Faar Clock

A huge analogue clock that tells you the time.

Twingly

Twingly plots where the blog activity is happening on a spinning globe.

Fire

This screensaver sets your desktop on fire… yet another reason not to sit too close to your screen!

FIREFLIES

Unique design that plays on the “pretty-things-that-fly-around-your-screen” genre of screensavers. (Thanks for the updated link DJ Lil’ John)

Digg Screensavers

Stack, BigSpy, Swarm, and Arc are products from Digg labs that can be used as screensavers.

Hand Written Clock

This clock has the appearance of constantly being updated by hand – very fun.

Star Trek System 47

For the Star Trek fans out there (not good for me, but hopefully for you), this keeps an eye on the galaxy for you.

Flip Clock

An old school “flip” type clock.

Briblo

See Lego models built before your eyes.

Screen Cleaner Screensavers

Four screensavers of dogs “cleaning” your screen”.

World Clock

World Clock Screen Saver shows your local time on its big central clock and adds five major time zones (Los Angeles, New York, London, Dubai and Tokyo) on smaller clocks placed around it.

Polar Clock

PolarClock 3.0 is now available as a screen saver for Mac and Windows, and also as a dashboard widget for OSX Tiger. This release is a total rebuild from scratch using Flash CS3, Flex Builder and ActionScript 3.0.

MappedUp

MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time.

Really Slick Screensavers

Some of these are real number cruncher screensavers. Computers are getting much more powerful these days, and [his] old savers don’t bring them to their knees like they used to. These ones do. Of course, you can still turn the settings way down if you have a pathetic, old computer.

Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Strange Pet

Funny kids screen saver from cbc.ca

Seti@Home (BOINC)

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Loopy

Loopy shows the most recently uploaded photos from all round the world.

It has been noticed that a 642-812 professional who does 70-620 later usually goes into screensavers production, as compared to the 1Y0-259 students who go on to study SY0-101 and eventually designing tests like 220-601.

I just found this screensaver. Any of you that have been using Windows for sometime will be familiar with this screen! Get it here.

Check out: Bad Timing – Windows Error Screen Pictures