Disable the .Mac screen saver

Aug 23, '07 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: robg

If you like to use the random screen saver option in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel, you might find the .Mac screen saver somewhat annoying: unless you've configured slide shows in its Options panel, the default view is a bunch of Apple products fading in and out of your screen -- and when in random mode, the .Mac screen saver can appear at any time.

Someone on the Macworld forums asked about disabling it, and I thought of two possible solutions. First, you could go into the Options screen for the .Mac screen saver and uncheck the Public Slide Show option. This will cause the saver panel to show a message stating you need to pick at least one public show before using the .Mac screen saver. However, I don't know if this will prevent the .Mac screen saver from showing in the random rotation -- it's not an easy thing to test!

The second solution, and one that's guaranteed to work, is to remove the .Mac screen saver from the list. Screen savers are stored in the /System » Library » Screen Savers folder, but if you look there in the Finder, you won't see the .Mac saver listed. That's because its name starts with a period, which means the Finder believes it to be invisible.

So instead, quit System Preferences, open a Terminal, and execute these two commands, pressing Return after each and providing your admin password when asked:

$ cd "/System/Library/Screen Savers"
$ sudo mv .Mac.slideSaver .Mac.slideSaver.old
That's it; the .Mac screen saver is now disabled. To get it back in the future, just use these two commands:
$ cd "/System/Library/Screen Savers"
$ sudo mv .Mac.slideSaver.old .Mac.slideSaver
I did test this solution, and it works -- as one would expect, since we're just renaming a file.

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