#Mac os screensaver not working how to#
#Mac os screensaver not working mac#

Not every screen saver is a good choice for a desktop background - some are too active and serve more as a distraction than anything else - but if you find the right screen saver, and if your Mac can handle it, animated screen saver backgrounds can make things a whole lot more interesting when working in OS X. Regardless, we recommend that most users turn off their desktop background screen saver before performing computationally demanding tasks like video encoding or real-time audio production, just to make sure that every ounce of power is available to the apps that need it.

As mentioned above, however, itвЂ™s easy to disable the screen saver once you set it as your desktop background (just close the Terminal window), so itвЂ™s worth testing it out to see if the performance hit is acceptable. Click the Show screen saver after pop-up menu, then choose how long you want your Mac to wait before starting the screen saver when itвЂ™s idle. While most modern Macs, even those with Retina displays, can handle a typical screen saver running on the desktop with minimal impact on system performance, those with multiple displays or older Macs may see performance issues with this method. On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Desktop & Screen Saver, then click Screen Saver. Some OS X screen savers, especially complex third party screen savers, can eat up a good amount of CPU and GPU horsepower. This also means that, by default, this change doesnвЂ™t persist after rebooting your Mac or logging out, although you can work around that limitation by creating an Automator action to execute the script and setting it to automatically run when you log in to OS X. If you quit Terminal or close the window with the screen saver background command, your screen saver will instantly disappear and youвЂ™ll have your old static wallpaper image back. First, this trick requires that the Terminal window in which you entered the above command remain open. Pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, there are two caveats you should keep in mind. Unlike a normal screen saver, however, the animation will play behind your desktop icons, interface, and windows, just like a standard wallpaper image. YouвЂ™ll see your default static desktop wallpaper image immediately replaced by your screen saver. Next, launch Terminal (located in the Applications > Utilities folder),В copy and paste the following command, and press the Return key on your keyboard to execute it: /System/Library/Frameworks/amework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background Whichever one you choose, just make sure itвЂ™s selected as the active screen saver, even if you have it set to never start in the вЂњStart AfterвЂќ duration drop-down menu. To use a screen saver as your desktop background, first head to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver and select one of the screen savers included in OS X, or a third party screen saver that youвЂ™ve previously installed.

#Mac os screensaver not working how to#

How to Set a Screen Saver as the Desktop Background in Mac OS XДЄpple has long offered users a wide variety of beautiful, high quality images to use as desktop wallpaper, but if youвЂ™d like something even more interesting on your MacвЂ™s desktop, you can use a Terminal command to set one of your MacвЂ™s animated screen savers as the background instead.