Tweaks For Vista’s Bubble Screensaver

The screensaver settings for Vista are pretty weak, luckily there are some known hacks or undocumented tweaks you can make to the system to enable different behavior in the bubbles.

The root key to apply settings below for the Bubbles screensaver is:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Screensavers\ Bubbles]
The 4 magic reg data settings under Bubbles are:

• MaterialGlass will determine if the bubbles are glass or not. 1 will turn the bubbles into glass-like transparent bubbles. A 0 will turn the bubbles into metallic non-transparent bubbles.
• ShowBubbles is a boolena and will determine whether the bubbles are displayed on your wallpaper or a black background. A value of 1 will apply the bubbles on the desktop while a 0 will render the bubbles against a solid black background.
• Radius determines the radius of the bubbles and is a floating point integer. A larger radius results in fewer bubbles.
• ShowShadows can cast a shadow and is also a boolean. 1 will enable shadows below the bubbles, a 0 will disable shadows.

These settings will set the screensaver for many small bubbles (see screenshot below)

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Screensavers\ Bubbles]
“MaterialGlass”=dword:00000000
“Radius”=dword:42d12d00
“ShowShadows”=dword:00000001
“ShowBubbles”=dword:00000001

These settings will set the screensaver for metallic non-glass bubbles.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Screensavers\ Bubbles]
“MaterialGlass”=dword:00000000
“Radius”=dword:41a00000
“ShowShadows”=dword:00000000
“ShowBubbles”=dword:00000000</p>

Here’s screenshots for the normal Glass (unmodified settings), followed by Radius for small bubbles and finally the metallic (non-glass) bubbles.

Normal Glass Bubbles

Small Radius Bubbles

Metallic (non-glass)

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