© 1999 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The cool green characters dripping down the monitors were a very cool effect in the Matrix movies, and you’ve probably seen any number of screensavers that give you the same effect.

However, have you ever seen this on your active Windows desktop? Now you can have it there easily. Won’t that impress all your geek friends? Okay, maybe not.

While cruising through SourceForge today, I ran across this Windows enhancement named ZMatrix. It’s free and open source software (FOSS), so you won’t have to worry about 3rd party advertising in this one.

Download the 2mb file and install it. There are no surprises and the initial setup is a breeze.

Here’s what it looks like on my desktop now.

It’s fully active, almost like having a movie as a desktop wallpaper. The two or three main settings I played with allowed me to either make the background black (as above) or show the characters streaming above my normal wallpaper, or even have the characters take on the color of the wallpaper behind them (as shown below).

There are tons more tweaks (shown below) that I haven’t even played with.

Wait, that’s not all. I almost forgot to mention that it includes a screensaver. The screensaver has all the same options, which makes it possibly the best Matrix screensaver I’ve seen.

Download / Home page for ZMatrix

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zmatrix/

Techie Buzz Verdict:

I love playing with this enhancement, and I’m guessing other old Matrix fans out there will also enjoy it. I couldn’t find anything wrong to criticize, but I’ll stop short of recommending it as a must haveapplication. It’s really only eye-candy.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (excellent)