14 DAY TRIAL // With tools such as VLC player, rigging your desktop with a video wallpaper is not a difficult task. The downside is that it’ll last only for the duration of the clip. With Okozo Desktop you won’t immerse your screen into the same experience but you will enjoy animated flash wallpapers from a pretty extensive list of categories and themes.
The application is free of charge and works on both 32-bit and 64-bot editions of Windows 7 and Vista. Getting it on the system is not standard as you will first have to download that gets you the installer and only then you can proceed to installing the program. Luckily, the installation process starts automatically the moment the real installer finished downloading.
Once launched, installation of Okozo Desktop goes smooth, with no complication; you have to run through the regular screens, just like in the case of any other application.
After installation, the application imposes itself on the desktop by applying the only wallpaper it comes pre-loaded with, a still one. In order to change it you have to add more options in the program. This can be done by downloading the wallpapers from the developer’s website.
They are all stacked into categories and you’ll also benefit from a thumb preview. Upon downloading them the developer also makes available a brief description of the action of the wallpaper.
Okozo Desktop’s interface is neither complicated, nor impressive. It is composed of a large screen tailored to give you a larger preview of the selected wallapaper, a filmstrip at the bottom which lets you browse through the items and a side bar in the right designed to display the variations of the selected wallpaper, if any.
All the options of the program are available in the upper part of the program window. These include applying the currently chosen item, access to the configuration panel, refreshing the interface to display newly added elements and the delete function to unload wallpapers.
The same organization of the wallpapers on the developer’s website is also present in the interface of the application. You’ll be able to search for a specific item or view the elements of a specific category.
To get an idea on the possibilities, you have interactive animations that follow the cursor on the screen, the clocks section which includes both analog and digital, as well as binary (if you can get yourself to read it right) or cartoons.
In the case of interactive landscapes you can stick on the desktop some of our favorites included the Newton Cradle, a spider on a white background slow-pacing towards the cursor and a “pack” of red fish you can feed when clicking the desktop. There is also a stick figure that tries to reach the cursor through various means: grappling upwards, parachuting, running or climbing.
Importing all the downloaded wallpapers is as easy as double clicking them. The application takes about a second to load it.
As fun and interesting most of these flash wallpapers are, one important aspect is resource usage. During our tests the amount of CPU and RAM required by the application was not high, but explorer.exe needed significantly more supplies to keep the wallpaper moving; and both CPU and RAM were visibly affected.
Sporting a Dual Core CPU and 3GB of RAM our test system showed signs of exhaustion as long as the Okozo Desktop animated wallpapers ran, with RAM usage increasing with about 100MB while CPU was constantly around the 50% value. The moment Okozo Desktop was turned off everything came back to normal.
Returning to normal also includes restoring the desktop screen to its previous configuration. This means that the previously set wallpaper will take the stage once again.
The settings panel in the application is limited in options and makes available only the possibility to configure the program to start at user login, check over the web for new items as well as updates for the product.
Okozo Desktop is easy to handle and makes available a pretty wide range of items to choose from. However, in order to provide its services it requires an important chink of the CPU and RAM, which might be more than what the average user would agree to give up.
On the upside, it makes for a cool way to make the desktop more attractive. The fact that you can turn it on and off at will also adds to its value, putting you in control.
All in all, Okozo Desktop offers animated wallpapers charging no money for it. The range of choices it makes available is quite interesting and definitely worth giving a try. Note: We repeated our tests on a different, more powerful test machine (Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz, 3GB RAM, 512 VRAM) and the results were much better. CPU usage barely tilted and peaked under intense activity at about 12% when feeding the fish. Given the new results we ugraded the "Price/Value" and "Ease of use" ratings to five stars. This does not affect the final rating but shows an overall improvement.
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
