(*or How to get from A to B via X,Y and Z!)

Ever wondered how it might be possible to produce a nice 3-D screensaver “very quickly” with no programming knowledge and just a tiny bit of effort? Well, recently I set up a pair of dedicated catalogue PCs in the Language Resource Centre. Using Active Directory Group Policy I locked them down pretty reasonably well, and set the display to never switch off. In order to prevent too much screen burn (and without using lotion!), I decided to enforce a customised screensaver through Group Policy via User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Enable  screen saver  and User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Force specific screensaver with a Screen saver timeout set in the policy to 300 seconds.

I used Xara3D 6 to create a project of an animated, rotating 3D textured text which displayed the following information over a couple of lines: “LRC CATALOGUE: TOUCH SCREEN to access” (Note: we purchased a copy of this software quite a while ago – but now I believe it is available as freeware (see Tom’s Guide). There was an option within Xara 3D to export the project as a screensaver. (.scr) file. Done!  Or so I thought. Nothing is ever quite so easy! I could not get this screen saver to work. So I went back into the project and exported it as a Flash animation (swf file). I then downloaded and installed InstantStorm, quite a nifty little freeware Flash screensaver creator. Using this software I was able to rapidly convert my swf file into a standalone scr file. With a little bit of fiddling to get the size right for the screens in question.

Due to possible incompatibility issues with 64-bit Windows (documented in the software), I had to install this screensaver from a different location than the normal %SystemRoot%\system32 (or SysWoW64) location. Again via Group Policy under User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Force specific screensaver / Screen saver executable name.

Bit of a faff-on, but a relatively cheap and quite non-technical way to produce a screensaver! Definitely going from A to B via X,Y and Z. But then hey, it got the job done!