Malfunctioning Screensaver?

[Bael]

Something rather curious - and incredibly irritating- that i have come across on my computer: I have my screensaver set to scroll through a folder of pictures. But even though the pictures display fine when I view them, many are often blank on the screensaver. They are randomly blank, as I have tested with only a few, and after several scrolls through them, each has at least shown once, and presumably been blank once or more.

Anyone happen to have any thoughts about this? I'm still running XP.

Cheers,
Bael.

[fodder]

totally off topic...

are you using crt? aren't screensavers totally counterproductive for non crts?

[Bael]

totally off topic...

are you using crt? aren't screensavers totally counterproductive for non crts?

I've never really used screensavers for their named purpose. I just want something more interesting on my screen than the background. They're screenshots from a game, so I have perhaps 100 or more :)

[Shizzle]

LCD's experience damage without screensavers as well, no? Zones that display the same items for too long get them 'burned in'. I'm not much of a hero at those things, though :)

[Nathan]

LCD's experience damage without screensavers as well, no? Zones that display the same items for too long get them 'burned in'. I'm not much of a hero at those things, though :)

Depends on the quality of the screen. Most newer screens have very little burn, whilst a lot of older screens can burn easily. The best thing to do is have a screen saver that's all one colour (so either power save mode or a single colour full-screen image) set to come on after a short amount of time, that way your screen shouldn't have time to burn.

As for the original question, I have no idea. It could be failing to load the pictures, but then, I don't know why it wouldn't. Perhaps it's a scaled up problem of the same thing that causes thumbnails not to show properly when you look at all the files in a folder of images. As for a solution: no idea.

[De-Legro]

Okay Plasma and OLED screens are susceptible to burn in, LCD aren't so much, they often suffer temporary "burn-ins" but tellingly most manufacturers exclude burn-in from their warranties. CRT's suffer from it less then they once did. Partly because we moved to colour screens, which are less susceptible then the old monochrome ones and partly because a layer of aluminium was added behind the phosphor of the pixels. This was done for other reasons but a nice side effect is some protection from burn-in. Modern Manufacturing also produces higher quality phosphor which  helps as well

As to the original question, I would look at what format those images are in, it is entirely possible the screen saver feature in XP is unable to load that particular format.

[Nathan]

As to the original question, I would look at what format those images are in, it is entirely possible the screen saver feature in XP is unable to load that particular format.

I was going to suggest that, but then I re-read and noticed Bael said they all load at least once :P

Also, I'd presume they use the same code as the picture viewer to load images, so should be able to load any image you can with that.

[De-Legro]

I was going to suggest that, but then I re-read and noticed Bael said they all load at least once :P

Also, I'd presume they use the same code as the picture viewer to load images, so should be able to load any image you can with that.

Its windows, never make a logical assumption with regards to the reuse of common modules internally. But yes the fact the images load sometimes in the screen saver does suggest something else.

[fodder]

eh... you just let the screen blackout (idle off) after a couple of minutes instead of screen saver?
----
anyway... what screensaver is it? windows? external stuff? what format? is there a size limit thing?

[Bael]

Its just the normal windows screensaver, where you can choose to use pictures instead of a preset screensaver.

[egamma]

Your system could be running low on memory (perhaps just video memory).