I have upgraded to the new (rather horrid) client, and while I must say I completely detest the new screensaver design and hope for a return of the classic look, I have ran into a problem with the screensaver.

My WIndows XP machine does not seem to be affected but my Windows 2000 (SP4) machine won't leave screensaver mode if the screensaver has gone to blank/black, i.e. as long as the awful thingy keeps rotating everything is fine, but as soon as the screen goes blank I'm unable to resume work, it just won't stop "screensaving" :)

Computer is still running, and can be accessed remotely, but needs a shutdown/restart to be able to login and work again. Anyone got any ideas what to do here ?

dont use the seti as the screensaver or set it to never go blank
ttyl
Jeff

> dont use the seti as the screensaver or set it to never go blank
> ttyl
> Jeff
>

Ok, I could set it to not go blank, but I would have a problem with that on a few of my machines but not using it as screensaver ? Call me selfish but the screensaver is kind of mandatory here, I want a nice screensaver and I'm letting my computer be used for computation meanwhile, leaving the screensaver out of it is not something I'd do, to be honest I'd probably rather uninstall boinc and go back to classic seti and if it would stop work as screensaver when it was shutdown i.e. would not process anymore I would get something else.

Regarding the hanging after blanking, I had the same problem, only it would eventually recover after a minute or two. I disabled blanking and this stopped.

If you go to the SETI@Home/BOINC site and navigate to Your Account/Preferences/SETI@Home/View-Edit/Edit SETI@home Preferences, you'll see that you can modify "Graphic Preferences". There are choices including:

SETI@Home Classic
Panels
Minimalist
Custom

After you make a change in your graphics preferences, it will get picked up by the client the next time it communicates with the server. You can force an immediate update (by right-clicking S@H in the Projects tab of the BOINC client).

I have found that you must File/Exit and restart the client to get it to change screensavers. I have also noticed that changes made in preferences at the SAH site are not always immediately available to your client, so you might have to update several times before you get them. To test the screensaver, go to the Windows display properties, select the Screen Saver tab and click the Preview button (W2K).

It's not clear to me what particular aspect of the screen saver you find objectional but, with the "Custom" setting, you can exert control over many of the animation parameters such as:

Frames per second
Horizontal and vertical oscillation range and period
Number of stars
Speed of stars
Etc.

You could set the oscillation ranges and periods to zero and stop the gyrating, for instance, if it's causing vertigo. However, freezing the animation makes it less useful as a screen saver as a long-displayed static image can "burn-into" a CRT (picture-tube monitor). This should be no problem with an LCD screen.

Cheers