DreamScene, one of the ultimate extras for Vista was released yesterday (according to Windows Update at least). This thing has been in “preview” for most of the year, and since Francois had been running the “preview” version without issues for a few days I thought I would give the release version a shot. For those of you who don't follow this stuff too closely, DreamScene plays video wallpapers on your desktop.

The installer worked fine, and it displayed OK but now my CPU was idling at 22% instead of the regular 3-8%, causing melty to run a good 5 degrees celsius hotter. Ever since Joel introduced me to RMClock (and since part of my laptop had previously melted) I've been keenly interested in the temperature and voltage consumption of my CPU at all times. I quickly disabled DreamScene and I was back to 3-8%. I wonder if it has got anything to do with the wacky “near-real-time” video thread prioritization in Vista? The real yawn here is that you could do this before with XP and ActiveDesktop. Maybe my Core Duo 2500 CPU isn't the stuff that ultimate dreams are made of.