There's no doubt screensavers bring a pleasant variety to your desktop. Not to mention they prevent your monitor from burn-ins. Still there are times they had better sit quiet and hadn't interfered with your work.

Demonstrating a slideshow, watching a movie, reading an article - all these activities and many others may leave your computer with no keyboard and mouse input for a few minutes. Depending on your preferred settings, two or three minutes of inactivity may be enough for a screensaver to start and interrupt your work when it shouldn't.

The obvious solution to problem is disabling screensavers right before any of those activities. However, it's very likely you'll forget to do it. Furthermore, it's even more likely you'll forget to turn screensavers back on later, thus leaving yourself without their benefits for indefinite time.

Thankfully, we are not first people who encountered this problem. Quite many different tools already exist to help you. They range from simple support for screensavers in some applications to universal and powerful tools to control them.

If screensavers interrupt you often when you watch movies, but otherwise don't bother you, you may find it sufficient to use a media player that has a built-in support for screensavers. For example, Winamp and The Playa have an option to prevent screensavers from starting while they play a movie. Consider using one of them or another media player having that option unless you are looking for a more versatile tool.

For those of you who'd like to have full control no matter what you do, there are many universal applications. This time we will talk about two of them.

If you want a program that is easy to use and that would allow you to disable screensavers quickly and then easily enable them, Hot Corners is right for you. It's a small tool letting you control screensavers in three ways:

* by moving mouse into one of screen corners

As you remember, earlier in my article What to Do if You Fall in Love With More Than One Screensaver we discussed standard way of switching between multiple screensavers. Having that possibility is a pleasure indeed. Just imagine that your operating system doesn't let you easily vary screensavers to suit your mood. You'd be forced to uninstall installed screensaver, and then install a new one. Avoiding this effort would lead you to a fabulous triumph of utter boredom! Thankfully, it's not case. Furthermore, as you will see, there are tools that make switching between your favorite screensavers a breeze.

As strange as it may sound, computers were created to make our lives easier. Really, they are very good at automating repeating and boring tasks. And now is very moment to remind them of that.

Imagine your innermost dream. You just sit doing nothing and your computer, your dutiful servant, takes care of your problem without your slightest intervention. All what is left to you is to enjoy fruits of its labor. Nice, huh? Ta-da! Enter Random Screensaver!

If you have never heard about Random Screensaver, fear not! "Random" here has nothing to do with a random and unpredictable mess on your screen. It's first little tool that will help you drive away boredom of manually switching between your favorite screensavers.

The idea behind tool is simple yet very useful. Random Screensaver is not a screensaver in first place. It wears this disguise to take control each time operating system says it's a perfect moment to start screensaver. Once in control, tool looks at list of available screensavers and asks a random performer from list to start its show.

That's it! If you install Random Screensaver, you will never have to switch your savers manually. Each time a different screensaver will start. All your favorites will get a regular outing!