pushing .jpg background through registry

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Nov 29, 2009
Messages
9,211
I am trying to put a logon desktop jpg (want to avoid bmp, too big) in XP but it won't show. I am using these registry keys:

Code: 
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]
"TileWallpaper"="0"
"Wallpaper"="c:\\windows\\background.jpg"
"WallpaperStyle"="2"

If I use a bmp it works fine, but I really want to avoid that if I can. Is there maybe another flag I need to enable for this to work? Think it's something to do with active desktop or something, but can't seem to find a reference to that. And yes the file exists in that location.

I want to avoid 3rd party apps as this is to be part of a logon script. If it really can't be done with jpg then I'll stick to bmp but I want to use this as last resort.
 
Active Desktop needs to be enabled to use JPG as wallpapers. Honestly, though -- I'd just use the BMP files because it has to decompress it to display it anyway, so you're not really going to save much when it comes to system resources.
 
Just convert it to a bmp. If I recall correctly when you set it to a jpg it just converts it to a bmp anyway and stashes it somewhere.

You're talking about a couple of megabytes, this isn't 1980.
 
Hmm yeah guess I'll stick to BMP then. It's just people constantly complain about the network being slow, so I try my best to keep things small. It's about 2MB per PC, so that's about 1GB of transfer, just for the background image.
 
You could write some type of an installer for it. Depending on the BMP, it might compress well with ZIP. You could copy the ZIP, extract the BMP file, and then make the registry change...
 
So have the login script first check for the existance of the background image and only change it when necessary. And are 500 people all logging in at the same time?
 
Red Squirrel said:
Hmm yeah guess I'll stick to BMP then. It's just people constantly complain about the network being slow, so I try my best to keep things small. It's about 2MB per PC, so that's about 1GB of transfer, just for the background image.
Click to expand...

Well, once the file is copied to the computer it's there until you change it, so this will just be a one-time deal, right? Plus I assume not everyone's logging on at the same time, so 2MB here and there in spurts shouldn't hurt anything. It's not like the entire 1GB of transfers will be occurring simultaneously.
 
The thing is this was part of a script that was being pushed every hour as well, but I ended up just separating it into another script, and it runs just once, until I "reset" it, so it's not a big deal now.

Just figured there was a simple flag for jpg or something, but yeah not really an issue anymore. Lot of these machines are very slow, so if pushing a jpg would make it so the machine has to convert to bmp, then that would be worse.

while the 2MB is not big on it's own, when you add it to the 3000+ other scripts, it adds up. Our network is a huge mess... the IT manager is a real nazi so we are afraid to do anything that is not needed that could possibly impact users. A simple error message, or a font changing on a machine will spark a HUGE lecture from him. So as a result the network is a mess. We only touch something if we really really have to and the staff turnover is high, so there's like a million fingers that have touched it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top