Screen Saver Question

dmesal said:

Just curious i work on a ship, could the Bubbles follow the movement of the rocking of the ship with the built in accelloromiter of the tablet that would be wild

In your case I would go with spapakons suggestion and try using the Watch 4 Idle app since it appears that you can adjust the settings somewhat. I've never used it so I would have to install it to test its capabilities. With my suggestion, because the Microsoft Bubbles screensaver has no settings such as the ability to use the escape button to turn it off for example, verses using the mouse, you're basically stuck using the mouse and if the mouse moves; as in your case with a rocking ship you'd have to click on the icon again. Since you're using a laptop though, you could just disable the mouse if you're using one since you have the pad on a laptop. In that instance, it would take touching the pad to turn it off. Good luck. I have a feeling that Microsoft has had a lot of feedback with regards to the transparent screensavers so maybe they'll come up with a fix for it, who knows?

Thanks spapakons

You are welcome! Also about the ESC button, I don't really remember, but it might be possible to configure it in the settings to stop with ESC. Have a look.

I couldn't get that Watch for Idle program to start Bubbles Screensaver in Windows 7 (transparent background) mode, but I wrote a program years ago which does the trick with Task Manager. It is set for 1 minute idle time.

BubblesScreenSaver.zip

Good Day All

so far bubbles works fine

flybynite said:

I couldn't get that Watch for Idle program to start Bubbles Screensaver in Windows 7 (transparent background) mode, but I wrote a program years ago which does the trick with Task Manager. It is set for 1 minute idle time.

BubblesScreenSaver.zip

Read the previous posts. Watch 4 idle loads an application (EXE) after a set interval of inactivity. You can configure it to load a screensaver (SCR). If you unhide known file extensions in Windows Explorer settings and then change the extension of a screensaver file from SCR to EXE, you could also double-click to start manually the screensaver, but of course the point is to execute automatically after some seconds (minutes).

I know it's an old thread but just wanted to point out the following in case others have the same issue as me:

The difference between starting an .scr file manually and letting windows start the screen saver based on the specified idle time doesn't just affect the screen saver's ability to draw onto the current wallpaper. It also locks out things like SendKeyPress commands run from a program like NirCmd.

So, if you want to, for example, control your music player with your voice using Google Home >> IFTTT >> Pushbullet >> Push2Run, and have commands work when your screen saver or slide show is active, you need to run the slide show separately rather than have the built-in windows screen saver start it for you.

I also know this is an old thread, but I also know that there are others like me, who browse around to search for solutions to problems, that don't disappear just because some time has passed. I had the same problem as OP, only in my case, there is no screensaver folder in the registry and not Bubbles.scr in the Windows folder. However, I combined [COLOR=#96F996 !important]zplugger[/COLOR]'s and [COLOR=#D8B9B8 !important]spapakons[/COLOR]'s solutions, and made a .bat file containing the line "@start /wait Bubbles.scr /s & rundll32 user32.dll" and then used the Watch 4 Idle program to execute it after 10 minutes of inactivity aaaaand... it doesn't work, unfortunately... W4I says that it couldn't find Bubbles.scr, which is weird, cause it's executing it through the .bat file I made, and it works perfectly fine if I just execute it directly through that. Not sure why having a program execute it FOR me would suddenly change anything.

In any case, because I'm a stubborn daugther of a nice lady, I just click on the shortcut to that Bubbles.bat file before leaving my computer... Microsoft. You're such an interesting cooperation.

Berton said:

I just copy bubbles.scr to the Desktop and double-click it to run when desired.

Yeah, I discovered that I'm dumb and had mixed up the location of the Bubbles.scr file with the location of something else I was looking for earlier, due to a different problem... I found it now and could've saved so much time just clicking the file itself, instead of making a bat that references it, lol. It'd still be nice to have it do it automatically, but that's not working for me, so this will have to do (I tried following spapakon's suggestion, changing the file from scr to exe, but W4I was in no mood for such shenanigans, so that doesn't work either). Oh well, at least we have a workaround.