Performance Snake Screen Saver for Windows NT

Background

Once upon the time I had the opportunity to administer Novell Netware servers. In addition to being really fast they had a really cool screen saver that could be started on the console. In Netware 3.x the "Netware Snake" was actually part of monitor.nlm, which displayed many bits of useful information. The screen saver was really just a snake that made its way across the screen, bouncing off the sides as it went. The cool part was that the length of the snake changed with the server load, as the load grew so did the snake. Newer versions of Netware still have the snake, multiprocessor machines can even have multiple snakes, each a different color. I always liked being able to tell how busy the server was at a glance and missed the snake screen saver when I started working with Microsoft Windows NT servers. I wrote this simple screen saver to fill the void in my life.

My CPU monitoring code is based on CPUMON by Pieter Philippaerts.

Features and user settings

• Screen Captures: Properties Screen, screen 1, screen 2, screen 3
• Works on Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
• Snake length changes based on total CPU or memory usage.
• Screen saver will optionally display the actual level.
• Snake color can be changed.

Downloading and Installing

The Performance Snake Saver will not run on Windows95, 98, or Millennium. In addition to the program you may need to put msvbvm60.dll in your system32 directory. (which is probably c:\winnt\system32\)

If you like you can also take a look at the source code, just remember where it came from. :-)

• Performance Snake Saver 1.0 - for WinNT systems (12K)
• msvbvm60 - Visual Basic v6.0 runtime DLL (690K)
• Source Code - in Visual Basic v6.0 (9K)

Similar Screen Savers

Other people have developed similar screen savers, here are two that reproduce the look and feel of the Netware Snake more closely than my program.

• NWSnake by Steven R. Rittmeyer - Length does not vary with system load
• NWSnake by Terry Yapt - Works with up to 4 processors

Legal Mumbo-Jumbo

Feel free to download and use this software as you wish. This software has been tested, but I am not responsible for anything that occurs to your computer.

Use at your own risk, yada, yada, yada.