Okay so one of the Vista Ultimate Extras that I was excited for since I first heard about it at CES '07 was DreamScene.  In case you don't know about it, DreamScene is an extension to desktop backgrounds.  It lets you use a video file as your desktop wallpaper.  You can either choose from some stock videos that come with DreamScene or use your own video.  From what I can tell though, the video you use has to be mpeg...no .avi files or quicktime.  When I first installed Vista Ultimate (I was using Vista Business previously) there were two things I was excited to use - the built-in Media Center and DreamScene.  For some reason the thought of having a waterfall as my desktop background excited me.


Video: Windows DreamScene Released - New DreamScenes

I've used the beta and the final release - but both times I ended up removing it after using it for a day or so.  Since then Microsoft has released DreamScene content packs that add additional videos for you to use and they finally released the video background that was shown during the demo at CES of DreamScene.  So now I'm using it again, and I kind of like it.  It's totally gimmicky but for some reason I've kept it around.  So basically I've ended up asking myself what the value of using DreamScene was.  I don't think there's much more to it than aesthetics.

My first concern with using DreamScene is that I'm a gamer, and I'm fairly stingy with my computer's resources.  That is to say, I don't run any extra applications than I have to - I close down IM, my web browser, and pretty much everything else whenever I don't absolutely need them.  You would assume then, since DreamScene offers even less value than say my Pidgin IM client, I would want to get rid of it instantly.  That's how I felt at first, but to be honest DreamScene is pretty good on memory.  Surprisingly good actually.  With it running I don't notice a performance hit at all, and that's not just because it's a lightweight application - Microsoft has built in some very simple but sensible features that really prioritize your system's resources (ram, CPU usage, etc.).  For example: the only time you're really going to notice the DreamScene playing is when you're doing something at the desktop.  If you're just going to the desktop to launch Firefox then, that's when you want to see DreamScene.  Therefore, when you have a window maximized and can't see the desktop at all, Dreamscene pauses itself.  This way it's not sitting in the background eating up CPU cycles and ram without you benefiting from it.  So at least it doesn't hurt your machine's performance.

So will I still be using DreamScene in a month?  I don't know.  It's something nice to look at and it's something different but the novelty may wear off.  I think there could be some better applications to this type of program in the future.  One idea I thought would be to make the background an application.  You could set an RSS reader to be your Windows background and then there would actually be a benefit for using something like this.  In fact, there already might be something like that out there, but I don't know if it would be as efficient as DreamScene is right now.  No one wants to have a slow machine just to save themselves a couple of clicks.  Any purely aesthetic feature like DreamScene has to be almost transparent.  You should never even have to think about if they're running, what they're doing, and especially how much memory they're using.  If you've got Vista Ultimate I'd say you should at least try out DreamScene.  Microsoft has been pretty slow to release Ultimate Extras like DreamScene so you should take advantage of those extra features you're paying for.

Listening To: Macbreak Weekly