Still, screensavers can look super-pretty, and whether you want one for nostalgic reasons or to show off the eye-popping colors of your IPS monitor, it’s up to you. You can still use screensavers in Windows 10 and Windows 11, so we’ve gathered the best ones for you here.
How to Change the Windows Screensaver
Before we start, you should know the basics of setting your Windows screensaver. To do so, right-click your desktop, then click “Personalize -> Lock screen -> Screen saver settings” (at the bottom). In the new window, you can choose your screensaver, as well as change how long it takes to appear and whether it should go to the login screen on resumption. The install methods for screensavers you download vary, but if you download a screensaver (scr) file, you can just right-click it, then click “Install” to get it. Other screensavers come as “exe” files with their own instructions. Now that you have the know-how, listed below are our favorite Windows screensavers.
1. Windrift (macOS Drift Screensaver)
Some of the finer details that’s always helped macOS feel that bit more premium than Windows are the little things like wallpapers without color banding, and those gorgeous crispy screensavers. Mac users will be familiar with the Drift screensaver, which was introduced to macOS in 2020. It’s a real looker, and now thanks to an independent developer you can also get it for Windows. There are a few steps you need to take, but just follow the instructions on the screensaver’s GitHub page and you should be fine. Then just kick back and feel smug as you amaze your Mac-owning friends that Windows has such glossy features!
2. FlipIt/Fliqlo
Fliqlo was one of the most popular screensavers, until earlier in 2021 the deprecation of Flash meant that it stopped working. Fortunately, the developer moved to revise Fliqlo so that it doesn’t require Flash to work any more (you will, however, have to uninstall the old Flash-based version) Alternatively, you can use FlipIt, and open-source non-Flash based successor to Fliqlo. It does much the same thing as Fliqlo, but with a few interesting extra options like World Times.
3. Windows Built-in Options
You may not have noticed, given how well hidden away the “Screen saver settings” are in Windows 10 and 11, but the OS does actually come with a few built-in screensaver options. You won’t find the biggest classics like 3D Maze or Pipes here (scroll down for those), but there are a couple of old-timers (3D Ribbons and 3D Text) in there, as well as some cute alternatives and of course the option to scroll through your photo gallery.
4. Wallpaper Engine
Part of the charm of screensavers is the that they’re animated. The thing is, Microsoft is slowly deprecating screensaver support, so to stay ahead of the curve, you may want to start looking for alternatives that do much the same thing. Wallpaper Engine is a super-affordable but very comprehensive tool available on Steam that lets you create animated wallpapers on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Alternatively, you can use one of the thousands of animated wallpapers created by other Steam users through the Steam Workshop. Additionally, you can set the wallpapers to animate when the PC has been idle for a certain amount of time, just like a screensaver. For more info on how to get up and running with Wallpaper Engine, see our guide.
5. Hal 9000
Looking for a screensaver that will replicate a famous cinematic experience of traveling across the galaxy? The misanthropic AI aboard the spaceship from “2001: A Space Odyssey” maybe isn’t something that everyone wants on the PC screen, but sci-fi fans may not be able to resist. It’s beautifully designed and true to the movie, with 28 different animations across the eight different screens that the HAL computer was in charge of. It’s slick and oddly relaxing, even if you do feel like at any moment Hal 9000 may go rogue and turn on you at any moment.
6. Hyperspace
Taken from the collection of Really Slick Screensavers (you can download them all in one pack if you wish), Hyperspace is unquestionably one of the best. It takes you on a rapidly accelerating journey through the cosmos where you fly through starfields that eventually morph into an impressive liquid landscape of neon pinks, blues and purples. It reminds us a little bit of that ’90s space movie “Contact,” except now you get to be the one flying through a black hole.
7. Underwater
Thalassophobes may want to steer clear, but for everyone else who wants an atmospheric, moody and subtle screensaver, this could be the one for you. This dynamic screensaver puts you underwater, looking up from the deep at some light shimmering through the surface of the water. It’s peaceful, it’s slick, and it includes a very elegantly designed watch right in the middle of the screen that also shows the date. A serious screensaver for serious people (unlike some of the crazy nonsense we have on this list).
8. Plane9
Possibly the most visually impressive array of screensaver effects, Plane9 is a 3D graphical visualizer containing over 250 beautiful and surreal scenes. You can even combine these scenes, getting them to smoothly flow from one into another, leading to a nearly endless supply of visual effects. What’s more, Plane9 moves and flows in time to whatever music you’re playing on your PC at the time – be it Spotify or iTunes. So leave some tunes on, let the screensaver take over, and you have yourself an excellent background visualizer for a party!
9. Another Matrix
With the recently-released Matrix Resurrections trailer, it’s fair to say that binary green text, trenchcoats and bullet-time are coming back into fashion. So celebrate this inevitability with this wallpaper. Another Matrix looks cool and codey, even if you don’t know what it all means, and you can change basic things like how quickly it pours down your screen, the font type and density.
10. Helios
One of the prettiest screensavers out there, Helios generates smooth purple bubbles, which dynamically react off each other, bouncing and spinning around on your screen. The colors are a lovely neon shade, and you can make various tweaks, like changing the number of bubbles on the screen, the motion blur, and even the frame limit!
11. IMAX Hubble 3D
A tie-in to the 2010 documentary about a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, you can still get this gorgeous screensaver that pulls in photos from the Hubble website. These are some of the most breathtaking images you’ll ever see.
12. Briblo
If you’re obsessed with Lego, you may struggle to keep your eyes and hands off this one. Briblo is not only nice to look at, as Lego blocks calmly stack on top of each other, but you can actually interact with it and create your own Lego stack – sort of like a makeshift 3D game of Tetris.
13. Electric Sheep
The trippy visualizations are created by a community of talented artists. Electric Sheep is an almost endless array of whirring, beautiful images. It takes a little setup, but the executable installation file will help you through it.
14. 3D Maze
Maybe this is a case of nostalgia-trumping quality, but if you remember the old Windows screensavers, you’ll remember this classic. 3D Maze is a first-person run through a maze with weird shapes floating around. You can change the wallpapers in the settings, but we like the original.
15. NES Screen Saver
If you don’t have a library of NES ROMs that you play on your PC, this screensaver will play a whole wall of random sections of NES 1 games for you. If you do have a ROM collection, you can link it to this screensaver and actually play random NES games from your library. (Warning: this is terrible for productivity.)
16. 3D Pipes
Another golden oldie, this 3D Pipes screensaver generates an endless array of multi-colored 3D pipes all over your screen. When the screen fills up, the whole thing restarts (a bit like Snake). There’s still something alluring about its 16-bit color jankiness.
17. Wikipedia
A bit more dry than others on this list, but if you seek to absorb knowledge at every moment of your waking life, then why not try this Wikipedia screensaver which picks a random Wikipedia page for you each time it turns on?
18. Apple TV Aerial View
Put those Apple zealots in their place with this screensaver, which gives you access to the same lovely aerial footage that Mac users get natively. This streams from Apple itself, so you’ll need an Internet connection for it to work.
19. Astronomy Picture of the Day
A nice alternative to the Hubble screensaver we mentioned earlier, this one pulls the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA’s official website. Some images are mesmerising, while others are crazy cosmic charts that might, frankly, be confusing (but cool nonetheless).
20. Blue Screen of Death
Maybe more of a cruel prank than a lovely screensaver in itself, this one is still good fun to foist on someone. It plays a loop of BSOD errors and system boots, giving the viewer horrid flashbacks of all the times this actually happened to them. As today’s LCD displays don’t suffer from burn-in, today screensavers mainly just move around looking pretty.
