The Vista of Sheep Electric

Well, I have a screaming new 64bit Vista machine (quad proc and 4gb ram) with a 22″ monitor.  So why not run a cool screen saver for those hours I spend just staring at my computer without actually doing anything?

Everyone gets all sweaty about Electric Sheep—and I’ll admit it’s pretty cool to regard.  It’s free and open source.  However, Microsoft is honery.  I had some odd issues in getting it working on this box.

I have gotten into the habit of running installation files with elevated privledges (right-click the .exe or .msi file and choose Run as Administrator from the context menu).  This was due to Spybot, but that’s another story.  Anyway, it’s my habit and maybe it’ll be yours also.

It seemed to install just fine, but there was nothing.  It didn’t appear in my Screen Saver Control Panel, and it certainly didn’t do any dreaming when my box went idle.  Unsatisfying in the largest sense.

I found this article from which I was able to craft my solution.

Turns out it’s really quite simple.  When you are installing the screen saver you will be confronted with this dialog:

Electric Sheep Setup Dialog
Electric Sheep Setup Dialog

In the “Directory:” box you want to ensure it reads:

C:WindowsSysWOW64electricsheep-cache

and not:

C:WindowsSystem32electricsheep-cache

Once you’ve do that, navigate into C:WindowsSysWOW64 and locate the file called ElectricSheep.scr—right-click it and choose Install and your finished.

Ah, the leisure life of an android…

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16 thoughts on “The Vista of Sheep Electric

  1. ok nevermind i figured it out! thanks man and one more question,
    i noticed the images are called sheeps,and their are alot of them out there, do i have to manually install the sheeps or will they automatically appear??

    1. Basically, it pulls sheep from the Internet. If you gave it permissions to do so, it will use bittorrent to acquire new sheep. You can find download locations and just download a boatload of them for the beginning, but it is not required. Eventually you’ll have a nice stash of them.

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