Portable Winpenguins

“You know what my desktop could use right now? Penguins floating all over the screen, man!” If this thought has never occurred to you, then don’t worry, you’re not alone. However, the (probably) one person in the world who did have that thought happened to be a developer and, well, now we have Portable Winpenguins.

After you start the program, you’ll notice the first tiny penguins dropping from the metaphorical sky of your desktop, sometimes hanging on the tails of even tinier red, blue and yellow balloons. Most of them explode when they hit the bottom of your screen, but sometimes they will explode before that or even when you click them. The bottom line is that the penguins explode and this is a good thing.

Now, according to the app’s description, they’re supposed to do other stuff as well, like walk on some of your windows and the task bar. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any of these things happen, most certainly because the app is very old and doesn’t work that well on Windows 10. I also noticed some glitches, like desktop icons becoming “invisible” after the penguins passed them.

Portable Winpenguins will stay minimized in your system tray, so it doesn’t bother you with anything else but the obvious. From there, you can access the options menu, where you can set how many penguins you want on screen, their falling speed and transparency. You could, in theory, also add Santa penguins to the mix, but this is an option that also failed to work with Windows 10, and you can only begin to imagine my disappointment.

As I said at the beginning of the review, this app doesn’t really have any use. Unfortunately it’s also bit too out of date to be just fun. I’d also advise you against enabling the sound effects.