Dreamscene

I downloaded the "Dreamscene Preview" Ultimate Extra today. It came with one Dreamscene background that is basically like the "Windows Energy" screen saver that came with Vista. I actually really like it. It looks nice, though the color-palette isn't quite to my taste. There isn't a big resource footprint for it, which I was initially worried about, and it really does give a nice "next-gen" feel to my desktop. Now all I need is a few more cool backgrounds.

Won't be much fun watching a movie behind your desktop backgrounds.

I fully agree with The Abyss. Playing an actual movie on your desktop is distracting and pointless, but having a nice background with a simple animation, like the one provided in the preview, is actually very pleasant. It's more of just an animated desktop, and I really like it. I think it will be a great feature as long as people can get creative and come up with some good backgrounds to use.

i use a loop from WMV HD show case or Apple HD Showcase
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/w [...] wcase.aspx
OR
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/ <<<<<Better

nice, its about time.
downloading now

If you have a dual core CPU, it takes virtually nothing - you'd only notice it if you had a CPU monitor running all the time.

I like the Fire background.

It seems to use about 7-8% cpu but it goes down to almost nothing if I have another window opened ( fullscreen ) so I'm guessing it stops playing when it's 100% covered by another window

fendi, they are pretty cool... they are free, if you haven't already downloaded them, the 4 extra scenes should just be listed as one of your pending updates. You don't have to even have dreamscene turned on but I do think you need to tell the Vista update site that you want them... just do a system update, and then tell the pop-up that you want the extra Ultimate-only dreamscene package - it will automatically download and install the latest ones into your library - it's really that easy!

If you don't already have dreamscene turned on, that too is easy, it is listed as a background in your preferences (look at the drop-down box), select 'dreamscene' and then pick the one you really like (my wife loves the bees). Enjoy! ...and I totally agree with the_abyss - I don't even notice it is there = certainly nothing _near_ 1% of my cpu, maybe some of you need to update your graphics drivers (uh, I use ATI if that makes a difference).

good luck!