A relaxing rainy window screensaver for your PC

Rain on glass, one of the classic screensavers in Screensavers by Zaweba, is made for exactly this. Raindrops gather and run down a window in front of soft, out-of-focus lights, and you choose how much rain falls, how fast the drops run and what's behind the glass: city lights at night, woods at dusk or plain grey.

Rain on a window is one of the most restful things to look at. It moves all the time but never in a way that demands your attention, and the blurred lights behind give the scene depth without detail to pick out. As a screensaver it turns an idle monitor into something you're glad to glance at.

Three views through the glass

The background setting changes the mood more than anything else. City lights at night gives warm, blurred points of colour, like sitting in a café window after dark. Woods at dusk is softer and greener, closer to a cottage on a wet evening. Plain grey strips the scene back to just the water on the glass, which is the calmest of the three and suits a work screen where even blurred lights feel like too much.

Try each one in the live preview. The manager shows the screensaver playing beside its settings and follows every change, so you can see the difference in seconds.

How much rain, and how fast

How much rain sets how many drops gather on the glass. A light shower leaves plenty of clear window between the drops; heavy rain covers it. Speed of the drops runs from 1 to 10. Slow drops creep and pause, which is the most soothing setting. Fast drops stream down as if the weather has turned.

For relaxing, a light to moderate amount at a low speed tends to work best. Turn both up if you want a stormy feel for a gloomy afternoon.

Making it your screensaver

Open Screensavers by Zaweba, choose Rain on glass and set it up while the preview plays. Press Preview full screen to sit with it for a minute at full size; move the mouse properly, press a key or click to come back. When it feels right, press Use this screensaver. It's built into your Windows profile without administrator rights, and Windows' Screen Saver Settings opens so you can pick it and set how long the PC waits before it starts.

You can come back and change the background or the rain any time. The screensaver reads its settings each time it starts, so nothing needs rebuilding.

A window for a quiet room

Rain on glass makes a good ambient screen for a study, a reading corner or a waiting area. On a second monitor, use the several monitors setting to choose one on each monitor, one stretched across them all, or only the main monitor with the others black. On a laptop, the battery saver in Install and options blanks the screen when the charge drops below the level you set, 25 per cent by default, so a long rainy afternoon on the sofa doesn't drain it.

If you want variety, Aquarium, Lava lamp and Aurora share the same unhurried pace. Tick them with Rain on glass and use Install several, and you get one screensaver that picks among them at random each time.

All of them are drawn by Zaweba's own code, run offline and come as free software under the EULA, with no adverts and no account.