Eye Strain

Eye Strain is a small Windows application whose purpose is to help you set up notifications so you can remember to take breaks from your computer and relax your eyes.

Not so impressed by the GUI

The GUI looks a bit outdated but the configuration settings are not difficult to decode so you are not going to spend a lot of time tweaking them.

Set up notifications

Eye Strain gives you the possibility to show popup notifications at a preset time interval, namely 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. A popup notification includes information about how to protect the health of your eyes and exercises meant to relax your eyes.
What’s more, you are given tips about how to change the refresh rate of your screen and you may check out several useful exercises, such as Palm Method, Look Outside, and Position, which include instructions and suggestive images.
Tests have shown that the application carries out a task quickly and without errors. It does not eat up a lot of CPU and memory resources so the overall performance of the computer is not hampered.
On the downside, the utility does not come with support for advanced features so you are not allowed to manually set the time interval when notifications are displayed on your desktop, configure audio reminders with custom audio files, and restrict the access to desktop for a certain time period, just to highlight a few suggestions.

Bottom line

All things considered, Eye Strain comes packed with basic features for helping you protect the health of your eyes, and is suitable especially for less experienced users.