The Members Forum

When screensavers were first introduced in the 1980s, they were designed to prevent burn-in on CRT monitors. In the LCD era, they've largely been used as a distraction and minor security feature, but Microsoft now has a new potential use in mind: reminding you of stuff that you've forgotten you ever did.

An ongoing Microsoft research project to discover how to digitally archive every aspect of an individual life -- capturing photos, videos, PC history and even TV viewing habits and archiving them automatically -- had found that using a screensaver was one of the most effective ways to browse the massive volume of content that results.