So you?ve got a nice Christmassy snow scene as your screen saver right now. Very pretty, but did you know that you can help the planet out by eliminating screen savers from your life. All you have to do is set your display to sleep. Yes, it?s surprising but these days most screen savers don?t actually save energy. Back in the dinosaur days of computers, screen savers were originally designed to prevent “burn-in” on the old fashioned CRT monitors. The science behind it goes like this: CRTs create an image by shooting electrons at the screen to excite phosphors which then emit light. The phosphors eventually “burn out,” becoming dimmer over time. If a static image was displayed on the screen for a long time, the phosphors used to display the image could become noticeably dimmer, resulting in a “ghost” of the image being permanently displayed. Screen savers reduced this problem by displaying constantly moving images if the machine was idle for a certain time. So, the moral of this tale is, get more sleep and give your computer an energy saving break.
