Why your lock screen should not feel heavy

01The program you run the longest

Think about what is on your screen across a whole day. The browser, a document, a chat — and, every time you step away, the lock screen. For many people that adds up to hours: lunch breaks, meetings in another room, the evening when the PC is left on to finish a download, the whole night on a desktop that never sleeps.

Anything that runs that long should be frugal. A small amount of work done sixty times a second, for hours, is not small any more. It shows up as a laptop battery that drains while nobody is using it, a fan that spins up in a quiet room, a case that is warm to the touch. None of that is acceptable for a screen whose job is simply to keep your PC private.

A small amount of work done sixty times a second, for hours, is not small any more.

02Beautiful and light are not opposites

MoLock ships 35 animated themes, from calm paper and graphite designs to rain-soaked neon cities and hacker consoles. Animation is part of what makes them feel alive, and we did not want to solve the weight problem by taking it away. The goal instead is the same picture for less work.

Most of the savings in the past releases came from one idea: draw expensive things once, then move them.

• The hacker themes (1337, Matrix Reloaded and Redroom) became three to four times lighter on the processor while locked. Each column of falling characters is now drawn once and then simply moved, instead of being redrawn on every frame.
• Cyberpunk, Synthwave and Vaporwave got the same treatment: the neon streaks, the city skyline and the moving perspective floor are drawn once and moved.
• Neon and Midnight Bloom have soft glows that used to be recalculated constantly. Now each glow is rendered once and only its brightness animates.
• MoLock Signature, the default theme, became about twice as light.

In every case the look stayed the same. That is the test we hold ourselves to: if you can see the difference, the optimisation was not finished.

03Effect tiers: Light, Medium, Heavy

PCs differ enormously. A gaming desktop with a dedicated graphics card barely notices a full-screen animation; a thin office laptop running on battery notices everything. One fixed level of detail cannot be right for both. So since version 2.6, every theme has three effect tiers:

• Light

  Calm motion · lowest load

• Medium

  Balanced for laptops

• Heavy

  Every detail · dedicated graphics

Auto picks the tier from your graphics card

The tier is not the same thing as the theme. A calm theme on Heavy can still be lighter than a busy theme on Light. The tier tells MoLock how much of a theme's detail to draw; the theme decides what the picture is.

04What Auto does

Most people should never have to think about any of this, so the default is Auto. MoLock looks at the graphics card in your PC and picks a tier to match: Heavy when there is a dedicated graphics card, a lighter tier on integrated graphics. You can override it at any time in Settings, with a live preview of the real lock screen so you can judge the result before you lock.

05Stepping aside for Windows

There is one more moment worth mentioning. When Windows shows its own lock or sign-in screen on top of MoLock — after sleep, for example — older versions kept drawing behind it, and on some PCs Windows' screen could appear to freeze. Since 2.6, MoLock steps aside instantly in that moment and stops drawing completely, then comes back, still locked, as soon as Windows hands the screen back. No work is wasted on a picture nobody can see.

06Tuning a single theme

Tiers are the big lever. For finer control, many themes have their own options in Settings, with the same live preview:

• Intensity and glow — how strong the effects are.
• Particle density — how many stars, sparks or raindrops fill the scene.
• Speed — how fast things move. Slower is calmer, and often lighter too.
• Accent colour — which does not change the weight at all, but makes the theme yours.

If motion itself bothers you, there are good choices too: pick Light, lower the speed, or choose one of the calmer themes such as Paper, Mono or Graphite, whose motion is slow and subtle. The three style profiles offered at setup (Simple, Professional and Dynamic) are a quick way to start from a sensible combination.

07A lock screen should be invisible in one way

You should see your lock screen and enjoy it. You should never feel it — not in the battery percentage when you come back, not in the fan, not in the warmth of the keyboard. Effect tiers, Auto mode and the quieter work behind each theme all serve that one idea.

• Browse all 35 themes in the themes gallery.
• What else is new: Introducing MoLock 2.7.
• Try it on your own PC: download MoLock free.