Is there a lava lamp screensaver for Windows?

You can have one for free. Screensavers by Zaweba includes Lava lamp, where soft blobs of warm wax rise, stretch, merge and sink again, just like the real thing on a shelf. You choose from four colour schemes, set between 3 and 12 blobs and pick a speed from 1 to 10.

A lava lamp is the ideal screensaver for anyone who finds busier ones distracting. Nothing flashes, nothing races, and the motion is slow enough to ignore when you're working and pleasant to watch when you're not.

The four colour schemes

The colour choices are sunset orange, deep teal, violet night, and lime and blue. Sunset orange is the classic warm lamp. Deep teal is cooler and suits a calm office. Violet night is darker and moodier, good in a dim room in the evening. Lime and blue is the bright, cheerful one, a bit more seventies than the others.

Try each in the live preview in the manager, which follows your changes as you make them. The difference between them on your own screen is more than the names suggest.

Blobs and speed

The number of blobs runs from 3 to 12. Fewer blobs give big, lazy shapes with plenty of space between them, which looks closest to a real lamp. More blobs mean more merging and splitting, more going on. Speed from 1 to 10 controls how quickly they move. Low speeds feel hypnotic. High speeds look more like a pan of something boiling, which is fun for a minute.

A good starting point is a handful of blobs at a low speed. You can always turn it up.

Because the wax moves so slowly, Lava lamp is also one of the easiest screensavers to leave running while people talk in the room. It gives the eye somewhere to rest without pulling attention away from the conversation.

Getting it running

Open Screensavers by Zaweba and choose Lava lamp. Adjust the colours, blob count and speed while the preview plays. Press Preview full screen to see it across the whole display; a key, a click or a real mouse movement brings you back. Then press Use this screensaver. It's built into your Windows profile with no administrator rights needed, and Windows' Screen Saver Settings opens so you can choose it and set the wait time.

Change the colour scheme next week and there's no rebuilding: each screensaver reads its settings when it starts.

A lamp for a second screen

Lava lamp makes a good ambient display for a spare monitor or a television at a gathering. The several monitors setting lets you run one on each monitor, stretch one across all of them, or keep it on the main monitor with the others black. A single lamp stretched across two wide monitors looks surprisingly like a giant lamp lying on its side.

Calm company for it

If you like Lava lamp, Aquarium, Aurora and Rain on glass share the same gentle pace. Tick them together and use Install several to get one screensaver that picks one at random each time. Every one of them is drawn by Zaweba's own code and named for what it shows, so you always know what you're choosing.