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Clock Saver

Combine a screensaver with a full-screen digital clock display and you have Clock Saver. This free, Flash-based screensaver is small in size but big in impact: You can see its digital display across a very large room. It displays hours, minutes, and seconds as well as AM/PM and the day of the week. Lots of apps do that, you say, and some do more. Sure; but Clock Saver has two things going for it: Its utter simplicity and its retro-cool, low-res digits, which look like something from the Moon Age. You’ll need Flash Player to use this screensaver. We tried Clock Saver in Windows 7.

Although screensavers are among the most basic of programs, they can be surprisingly tricky to install and set up, but Clock Saver’s one-click process is mostly foolproof. After the installer exited, we double-clicked our desktop and selected “Personalize” to access our screensaver settings and set up Clock Saver’s options. But the only option available merely changes the screen resolution from 1024×768 to 800×600; There’s no 24-hour clock, no world time, no alarms, and no style or color changes–just a super-easy screensaver that works when you tell it to.

We pressed preview, and Clock Saver’s huge blue digits filled the center of our blacked-out screen. Screensavers are a matter of taste, and with so many clock styles to choose from, it boils down to this: Either you like Clock Saver’s look, or you don’t. We like it a lot. Sure, it’s HUGE. That’s why we like it. But what we like best is the way it simulates the visible scan lines of a low-resolution numerical display from back in the day. It’s just what you’d expect to see flickering on screens in NASA’s Control Room. Of course, Clock Saver is free, so if you don’t like it, simply delete it. But you could spend a lot of time tinkering with more complicated clock displays and still not come up with something half as cool as Clock Saver.