WallpaperSleep

While Wallpaper Engine can certainly spice up a desktop with those stunning animated wallpaper, many users have complained that they notice spikes in their computers’ performance. One of the reasons for this seems to be that the tool continues to run the wallpaper in the background, despite the fact that the PC is locked and screensaver active. WallpaperSleep is a tiny utility designed to address this nuisance.

The idea behind the tool is to perform a regular check-up, every 3 seconds more precisely, to determine whether the wallpaper is running and shut it down. According to the developer, the tool is designed to address wallpaper solely and ignore the screensaver. If the computer is locked and the wallpaper is running, the program launches a child process that forces Wallpaper Engine to abide to the rules and shut down the program.

Take note that similarly to Wallpaper Engine, the application may take a short time to pause and resume animations as it checks the running processes. The utility needs to be re-launched every time the computer is rebooted. Users wanting to skip the later step, could consider creating a shortcut for the tool and  including it in the Startup Folder.