in message
Does Outlook have its own screen saver to announce the arrival of
new emails?
If not, I hope Microsoft will build one into the next version of
Outlook.
There are times, when I need to read lengthy items at work and my
Windows XP
screen saver kicks in. I'm glad it does, because my monitor should
be using
less energy during that time. The problem is - I'm always wondering
if I've
received any emails, therefore I tend to stop the screen saver as
soon as it
starts. I would like the best of both worlds - saving electricity
while
knowing when messages arrive.
An all-black screen on an LCD monitor uses slightly more power than an
all-white screen. For a CRT monitor, all-black does save power over
painting anything on the screen - but then you want it to paint a
count of new mails which means the guns will never turn off for the
monitor and you've saved no power. You will need to configure your
monitor to go into standby power mode if you want to save on
electricity since the screen saver won't do that for you. Once the
monitor goes into standby power mode, NOTHING is displayed on the
screen whether you have a screen saver running or a bunch of windows
open for several applications. You'll have to choose one or the
other: monitor goes into standby power mode and displays nothing, or
monitor stays powered up all the time so a screen saver could show you
some info.
Personally I've never found much use for a screen saver. At work,
their policy pushes the settings onto my laptop to use a screensaver
which activates after 15 minutes of being idle (for which I run a .reg
file in the Startup group to override to change it to 1 hour). At
home, I don't bother using a screensaver because I have the power
options configured to power down the monitor after 1 hours (and the
hard disks after 30 minutes) but I don't want the CPU to duty cycle
down. Rather than use standby, I just have the monitor and disks
power down. Well, if the monitor is powered down (or in standby) then
it doesn't display anything even if I did have a screensaver active.
If you hit the Power button on your monitor to turn it off, would you
really expect it to show some window or text after that? Low-power
mode also means the display doesn't show anything; otherwise, it
wouldn't be in low-power mode.
You'll have to Google around for a screensaver that shows your e-mail
count. Most likely they will do their own e-mail polling (i.e., act
like an e-mail monitor) than try to use Outlook or Outlook Express to
get that info. What you probably will end up with is an e-mail
monitoring program that includes its own screensaver, like ePrompter.
But obviously if you can see this screensaver then your monitor is
fully powered up.
