What to Do if You Fall in Love With More Than One Screensaver

If you don't know where one screensaver goes when you
install another one then this article is for you. Learn
about the standard way of switching between installed
screensavers and get prepared to a much more convenient one.

It was a great surprise for me to get dozens of emails
complaining about what I myself would have never thought of.
Many people installed my Rainy Screensaver
( http://www.elasticsystems.com/rainy/ ) and found it
quite entertaining. But then they got upset because their
previous screensaver was very fun too and now it wouldn't
come up anymore.

What has happened to their old screensaver after the
installation of another one? Today we will deal with this
question.

Probably, many of you will find this information rather
obvious. I am really sorry for not being very helpful to
this part of my readers this time. But I receive too many
emails of described nature. This leaves me with the hope
that some people will learn something new in their quests
for becoming Screensaver Gurus.

Here we go. The root of the problem is that screensaver
installation hides many steps happening behind the scene.
This is very convenient but it's what makes the answer to
our question not so obvious for many people.

I hope you were following my articles. In Windows
Screensavers Explained I told you about the place where
screensavers live in your system. But don't worry if you
missed that article. Here's the information you need.

Your operating system (and we are talking about Microsoft
Windows here) expects to find available screensavers in two
folders on your hard drive. These folders are C:Windows and
C:WindowsSystem if you use Windows 95, Windows 98 or
Windows Me. If you have Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows
XP then these folders are C:WINNT and C:WINNTSystem32.
Note that I suppose you system is installed on your hard
drive C. If your system is on drive D, you should look into
D:Windows. The same goes for other drives.

When you install a screensaver it gets into one of these
folders. The screensaver simply copies itself over there.
Some screensavers have more than one file. Usually they copy
other files into a separate folder under your Program Files.
But it makes no difference for the purpose of our
discussion.

The main idea behind all this is that your previous
screensaver doesn't disappear. A new screensaver copies
itself into one of the mentioned folders. But copying is not
removing. The previous screensaver is not removed unless you
uninstall it manually. That is, if you install two or more
screensavers, you can still enjoy all of them.

What exactly should you do to admire all screensavers
installed on your system? The answer is simple and you could
easily find it yourself by an accident. Try the following.
Right click anywhere on the empty desktop and choose
Properties. You will see Display Properties dialog. This
dialog has many pages but you need the one named Screen
Saver. Activate it by clicking on its title. You should see
a preview window with the last installed screensaver. Now
look below that window. There's a drop down list with the
name of that screensaver. This drop down list is the answer
to our question. You can select any screensaver installed on
your system by clicking on the list. After that Windows will
launch only the screensaver you have selected.

The described solution is perfect if you have two or three
favorite screensavers and would like to change between them
once in a week. But what if you have five or ten favorite
screensavers and want to see them on a day-by-day basis? We
will beat this problem next time by introducing a few quite
useful tools. They can make switching between screensavers a
lot easier and more entertaining. Stay tuned...