The other day it occurred to me that screen savers are a thing of the past.

They just serve no purpose anymore. Now we have “energy star compliance”, and it really is better: automatically turning off the monitor saves your screen *and* saves energy (and by energy, I mean money). Which means screen savers are something only old people care about. How sad!

I was a proud owner of the After Dark collection of screen savers (among others). You may remember them as the “flying toaster” guys.

I used to love playing with these screen savers. No joke, back then I probably changed my screen saver, or at least the settings, every few days.

These days, I am enamored with the Picasa photo screen saver. All of us in the family have been known to become entranced by seeing random old pictures from vacations, or from when the kids were younger. But it only comes on for a little bit, and then the screen shuts down. You probably only get to see 20 pictures or so before it all goes dark.

Am I the only one who is depressed about this? Screen savers used to be a conversation starter. “Wow, that thing is awesome, where’d you get it? It looks like a real fish tank/burning log/dos prompt/dog taking bites out of your screen!” Or “Oh, you’re still using scrolling marquis/one where the corners of the laser shape bounce off the edges of your screen and change color? What an out dated LOSER!”

Oh well, I guess it’s just one more thing to tell my kids about when they grow up. “Back in my day, our screens didn’t shut off! They got burned-in images if you didn’t have toasters flying all over the place! And the toasters had to fly uphill both ways!”