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[CaptainStrong]

Not that I have it, but will 1 gig of ram allow for animated wallpapers? I thought I heard the reason we don't see many now is because it will kill system resources. So I was hoping with such a monster amount of memory we'd finally see a desktop that is an aquarium or something like it? You know that'd be like whoa. Without hindering performace of course.

 

[Shogmaster]

It doesn't only eat up RAM, but things like CPU cycle. Animated desktop wallpaper is a bad idea no matter how powerful your rig is.

 

[automagnus]

Go for it, it doesn't hurt to try.

 

[atomsk]

i did this once. it was something very simple, but i found that it wasnt so much my system that got dragged down, rather the fact it got real fucking annoying, real fast.

it's not so bad if you dont have something FULL SCREEN. then your system chugs to a halt.

for the record, what i did, was have a whole desktop covered with the laughing man logo, and had just ONE of them animate...

this logo

 

[CaptainStrong]

holy shit. it took me like 5 minutes just to read what the hell was going around, then i went and puked. But anyway, good idea of making a small animated piece of wallpaper...

 

[TekunoRobby]

Flash is the best method to go about doing an animated wallpaper at the moment. Atleast I think so, I can do a very quick tutorial on how to set up a flash file to run in the background as an animated wallpaper. The best ones are usually those trippy looping flash films.

 

[Mr Gump]

holy shit. it took me like 5 minutes just to read what the hell was going around, then i went and puked..

:lol

 

[Phoenix]

Running an animated wallpaper is pretty much the same as running a game on your desktop all the time. The OS will be constantly repainting the screen, sucking up VRAM, and flipping buffers - this it will eat memory and it will eat CPU.

 

[CaptainStrong]

Now that I understand what it takes to run an animated desktop, when will we see machines that can handle them??

 

[shuri]

By Monday i guess.

 

[DaCocoBrova]

drempels is pretty...

*click*

 

[DarthWoo]

Speaking of RAM, does anyone know if prices are going up or down at the moment? I occasionally see some good deals here and there, but usually miss out on them.

 

[mrklaw]

what you want is for ATI or NVidia to have a special 'animated wallpaper' mode. Then you can install it on some of the *256MB* that some of these cards are having these days.

Honestly, when you are running normal windows, how many of those megs are being used? And with their uber power, flipping some frames isn't going to worry them. Unless they get bored and fall asleep, but I don't know if graphics cards can do that.

 

[Mason]

You can set an animated GIF as your wallpaper, so just make one that's as big as your resolution.