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Monday, 8 November 2004

Dynamically changing wallpaper in Windows 2000 / XP - Techie

There's a little batch script that I wrote to change a PC's software settings depending on which department was using it - it was fairly straightforward, using a cheeky little program called reg.exe (xxxkB Zip). However, try as I might (using the F5 key, mainly), I couldn't get the wallpaper to change (as a means of showing the users what are the current settings).

Even if you copy a new bitmap over the current wallpaper filename (e.g.

copy C:\winnt\dept1.bmp C:\winnt\wallpaper.bmp

) it doesn't take effect until you next log in.

However, after a little research, I found a handy little command you can type to refresh the user settings:

rundll32 user32.dll UpdatePerUserSystemParameters 1 True

If you stick that on the line after the copy command in a batch file, it'll do the job nicely.

This, and other top tips may be found at: www.robvanderwoude.com

Posted by james at November 8, 2004 1:33 PM

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