how screen savers potect the screen..?

In days of old, when monitors were not so sophisticated, screen savers were necessary to prevent images form being "burned" in to your monitor screen. With today's monitors, especially lcd flat panel monitors, it isn't as much of an issue. ever see a really old monitor when the computer is turned off, like form an old office DOS system? lol, it used to be pretty bad, that's why they created screen savers, so that during idle time, there wasn't a constant image there to burn itself in.

I never knew what screen savors were for untill I read the post resposes here. I have use four to five screen savers since I have onwn my computer. I would say the reason people still use them is for expressive reasons.

These days, there is no real reason for screensavers. Before the days of Windows, when every character had a specific place on the screen, it was possible for the phosphor on the screen to 'burn' or to retain the image of text that was constantly shown in that position. With the advent of the Graphic User Interface (Windows or the Mac interface) and especially with colour screens and LCD screens, it is not nearly so likely for a constant image to 'burn' into the screen. These days, screen savers are much more often used as a security device in offices to prevent people from seeing what is on screen when a user leaves his desk.

Screensavers are still widely used,partly out of habit and partly out of pleasure.As many monitors become LCD screens,burn-in is no longer an issue.Even if you don't apply screen savers nothing should happen to your screensaver if its an LCD montior screen.There is also a password protect screen saver option to stop outsiders from accessing your PC.That way a screensaver is beneficial too.

The screensavers were used time ago with the old CRT monitors to prevent "burning" of the phosphor on the screen, this means: if a static image remains so much time on the CRT screen the phosphor could get burned and a "shadow" of the image stay in the screen forever due to this "burning" so the scrensavers had the purpose to place a dark image (in most cases) and a lot of movement in the images on the screen to prevent static images for the time the computer is not used. The modern LCD monitors not suffer this problem so there is no need to worry about "save the screen" in fact the most new CRT monitors were so good an minimize the problem of "burning" but the screensavers stay being used as a curiosity and fun things. Regards.