Saturday, April 10, 2010

Change wallpaper background image on Windows 7 Starter for netbooks

This came as quite a surprise. I knew that Windows 7 Start might have some limitations. Luckily, the limitation of started applications has been dropped. But the only really annoying thing that it is missing is the ability to change your wallpaper. This is really a bummer and I can imagine that quite a few people will pay the $80 bucks for an Anytime upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium just for this reason. But I don't want to throw my money at Microsoft for such a silly reason, so I investigated whether it is possible to change the wallpaper through some registry-hacks or something. I found out that many just replaced the original image and it worked for them. They were using older (pre-release) versions of Windows 7 Starter and this has been "fixed" in the final release. So the only way is using tools like WindowBlinds by Stardock. However, this tool will replace the complete look and feel of your Windows installation. Since I like the original look and feel and don't want to replace a large part of my system with 3rd party software, so I looked into more possible solutions. The best tool that I could find is available at a french site and called Starter Background Changer. This tool replaces the "Personalize" screen of Windows with a home-made interface (that has a few funny translations, at least in German) that lets you change your desktop's background image and some other settings. Here's a screenshot of the interface in German:

Starter Background Changer screenshot

1 comment:

  1. hai.. i too bought the n150 plus.. and i cant change the wallpaper... so how do i do it?

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