Popular Screensavers is well organized and has a really nice setup, but that is about all it has going for it. The problem we encountered was in order to get any product from this screensaver service site you must install a toolbar. Most good anti-spyware, including ours, will block dangerous files from ever downloading on your computer.
Not only is there a required toolbar, but several other add-ons. These add-ons enable the animation to play while the product is previewed. None of the downloads were infected with spyware or adware that we could tell. The site makes a point of saying the toolbar is not harmful to the computer and we couldn’t find anything to prove otherwise.
As with all websites there is no guarantee that the downloads will be adware and virus free. As a precaution, whenever you get any program off the Internet, we recommend using anti-virus and anti-spyware software to provide protection against harmful programs that can threaten your system.
The setup of this site is very user friendly. Once the toolbar is installed it is great to peruse the site, looking at what they have.
Their products included everything from photographs to computer generated images. While this site did not have the most features we’d seen, there was quite a bit.
When the toolbar was not loaded, there was a popup telling us to load the toolbar after we clicked on anything. This was very irritating but went away when the toolbar was successfully loaded.
The setup of this site is very user friendly. Once the toolbar is installed it is great to peruse the available products. To download a product, just click on the image and in just a few seconds the new product will be available for use. Part of the toolbar installation includes a product management system. Here you can change the order of the images and monkey with the settings. We ran into a problem when we wanted to preview a particular image. It always previewed from the beginning so we had to make sure the image we wanted to see was first.
Once we removed the toolbar, all of the product we downloaded was also removed.
The quality of the images was poor. We tried nearly a dozen products and were disappointed with all of them. The thumbnail images look a lot better than the full sized.
The categories available were extensive. Within each category was a sub-category and it showed how many products were available. There was also a decent search box. We were always able to find what we were looking for.
They offer an email submit form as well as a small FAQs. This information was helpful when we wanted to remove the toolbar.
Overall, Popular Screensavers is one that would be worth looking into but there are plenty of other services that provide better quality product. While the product manager was helpful, we wanted something that was more pleasing to look at. Check out the other screensaver service sites at the top of our review.
