Amanda and Robert
The Screen Saver
Be the first on your block to have the screen saver that celebrates the wedding of my daughter. Please review the usage notes below and then download the zip file at the bottom of this page. Please note that the file is large because it includes more than 150 wedding photos!
(You may also view the photos online.)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
1.) Windows 2000, XP, 2003. It will probably run on Windows ME as well but almost certainly will not run on Windows Vista and definitely will not run on Windows 98.
2.) 40 mb or so free space on the hard drive where the screen saver is installed plus 100 mb free space on the C drive to run comfortably.
3.) The more memory the better. CPU speed should not be much of an issue.
HOW TO INSTALL THE SCREEN SAVER
1.) Download the screen saver to your desktop
2.) Extract the contents to a folder of your choice such as "c:\wedding_ss"
NOTE: Make sure that all of the images are in the sub-folder Resources
3.) Right-click on "amanda_robert_ss.scr" and choose Install
4.) The Display Properties dialog will open. Click Preview.
NOTE: At this time, the images will be cached. If you have a slow computer, please be patient.
5.) When the images begin to display, press any key to exit Preview.
6.) Press OK to close Display Properties.
DISMISSING THE SCREEN SAVER
1.) Once images start displaying, they will continue to do so until you press a key, click the mouse or move the mouse. When moving the mouse, the cursor has to move more than 10 or so pixels in any 1/10 second period to close the screen saver -- this was designed to prevent the screen saver from closing merely because the computer table got jostled.
ADVANCED USAGE NOTES
1.) Images
a.) The images that are displayed are in the Resources folder. Because they are cached, I reduced the resolution to 1024x768.
b.) You can freely add and remove pictures but the changes won't take effect till you reboot. (You could also right-click on amanda_robert_ss.scr and choose Install to force the images to be recached.)
c.) When installing, the images are recached. After that, there is no delay unless you change images.
NOTE: I HAVE NO TESTED CHANGING THE IMAGES. IF NEW IMAGES ARE NOT INCLUDED, THEN TRY REINSTALLING THE SCREEN SAVER AS NOTED IN ITEM 2B OR CHANGE FOLDERS AS SHOWN IN ITEM 3B1 BELOW.
2.) Screen Saver Behavior
a.) Right-click on your desktop and choose Properties > Screensaver. Alternatively, select the Display applet from the Control Panel.
b.) Press Options to change how the screen saver behaves
1.) Select Browse if you want to choose a new folder of images.
2.) To change how long each image is shown, TYPE a new value into the Delay box. The default is 6000 (6 seconds). To set it to 7.5 seconds, enter 7500. You can use the up-down arrows but right now they only change the value by 1 (oops).
3.) Click Show RSS to display the RSS News Feed of your choice overlaid on the images. Right now this seems to only show headlines. I would leave it off but experiment if you wish.
4.) RSS address: Enter the source of your choice into the RSS 2.0 URI textbox. You can enter RSS Feeds in Google to get a listing.
5.) Press Validate to make sure the RSS feed is valid.
c.) Press Apply to save your changes. Press Cancel to undo any un-saved changes. Press OK to commit the changes and dismiss the dialog.
PROBLEMS
1.) The most likely problem is having too many large images in the images folder. All of the images are cached and so you probably shouldn't have more than 300 or 400 images of 200k or so. If the images are larger, you need to have fewer images. I think 35-50 mb of images is a good rule of thumb. You'll get better performance with fewer and smaller images, especially with slower computers.
2.) Because images are cached, your hard drive needs to have plenty of room for the windows swap file. In general, this will be your C drive. As a rule of thumb, you should have 20% free space or 100 mb -- whichever is more. You can get away with less but performance will suffer.
3.) If you have other problems, email me at mike@mmacdonald.com. If you get an error message, please include the details.
Download the screen saver