I, for the life of me, cannot figure this out. What do these mean?



Ok, "Blank Screensaver" I understand. But "Run Boinc Screensaver:" baffles me. What is the BOINC screensaver if it isn't the project in BOINC you have running? And why would you select it to run for what I can only assume is 1 minute? Silly options. If you select this screensaver to run in Windows Display Properties, you already choose there when you want it to run. Why would you here choose never? Wtf? Why is there no "Run always" option in the section for "Run project screensavers for:"? Holy crappy GUI options Batman! This is so poorly thought out. These options are counter-intuitive and conflicting.

BOINC contains its own screen saver, which can be run when the project has no screen saver/graphics application. This screen saver will start up, if you chose any of the other options than Never.

However, when you choose Never, you won't see the BOINC screen saver itself and the screen saver will only switch between the project screen avers, or only show the one if there is only one. The BOINC screen saver will then only show when there is no project with its own screen saver.

There is no "Run always" option for any of the project screen savers, since a) not all projects have a screen saver, b) you would then have to choose which project you want to run always and c) as that is counter-intuitive.

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I did work this out empirically a few months ago, but I've forgotten some of the details since sorting out my preferred settings.

As Ageless pointed out, there's a BOINC "overview" screensaver (which tells you to what projects you're attached, the progress of the currently processing task(s), how many points you've got, etc.) and screensavers for many of the projects. Computers with more than one processor can process more than one project task at a time.

My own settings (as show in Mac OS X) are:
Blank screen saver after: 4 minutes
Run overview screensaver for: 0 minutes (=never)
Run project screensavers for: 4 minutes
Switch between project screensavers every: 1 minutes

The effect is:
The BOINC overview screensaver isn't shown at all, although some BOINC messages are shown in the absence of running project screensavers.
The screensavers for the currently processing tasks are run in sequence for a total of four minutes, switching between them every minute. My machines can process two tasks at a time, so it's task 1 -> task 2 -> task 1 -> task 2 -> stop. At the end of four minutes, the sequence stops running and the screen goes blank. If one of the projects doesn't have a screensaver, the sequence is monopolised by the one which does. If neither have one, then the BOINC fill-in stuff (but not the overview) is shown.

Hope this helps a bit.