Hanging Wallpaper

Recently my company was celebrating a big deal with a new business partner. Our Marketing department was arranging some activities to mark this momentous occasion and one of their ideas was to change everyone's wallpaper to an image from our partner's latest advertising campaign.

Up to now we haven't had a policy on desktop wallpaper and have left our users to stick up whatever they want: a picture of their pet lizard, a screencap from Edward Penishands, or usually just an unnaturally green hill.

Anyway, my manager comes to me and asks how we in the IT Department could make this dream a reality.

Now I'm no fool, and I can see some problems with this. Firstly, users don't like the IT department dicking about with their computers and changing stuff without a bloody good reason - it makes them anxious.

Secondly, people get very attached to their wallpaper. I remember one of our older Sales dudes had a knackered old PC with very little RAM. Large wallpaper uses up a lot of RAM so our desktop support guy removed the wallpaper to try and speed the old machine up a bit. When the Sales dude saw the wallpaper dissapear he nearly broke down in tears. It was picture of his daughter and he'd just recently got divorced: about the only chance he got to see the kid was on his damn computer.

So, I can see that we're being asked to do something that could make us very unpopular and I beg my manager to ensure that the Marketing team announce the change and that it's made entirely clear that it's their idea. My manager hates to see a grown man whimper and so agrees that he'll make that part of the deal.

Great. I then get to work on how I can do this. Unfortunately group policies are out because not all of our users are in a domain. That also rules out login scripts. Thankfully we do have a groovy product called Kaseya that enables us to deploy applications, copy files, run scripts and all sorts of other nice things. I then think I could copy a batch file in to the Startup folder in the All Users profile that'll change all the necessary registry keys everytime a user logs in. It's not a brilliant solution but it will do the job quickly and, after all, I'm on a tight deadline.

I go through my testing process and I'm shocked: my script works perfectly first time! I let the boss know that it's ready to roll and we schedule a time for the work. The boss then goes off to have a chat with Marketing.

It was at this point that everything changed. Once the Marketing department realised they'd be taking the blame they got cold feet and called it off. What was a perfectly great idea when IT were taking responsibility became a bad idea when they were. I let out a mirthless laugh.

You see, no one likes to be the bad guy and it happens too often in companies that IT are sent in to be the enforcers. We get treated like the bouncers at a night club, only there to suck the joy out of everything. Anyway, this misuse of the IT department is a subject that's a favourite of mine and I shall return to it in a later post.

I was not surprised by this turn of events. To be surprised that the Marketing department would worry about it's image is like being surprised that an orange is orange or that a fly flies. In the end it wasn't hard work and I was at least pleased that we got what I thought was the right result.

Now seems an appropriate time to quote Bill Hicks:

"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No, this is not a joke: kill yourself . . . I know what the marketing people are thinking now too: 'Oh. He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market.' Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags."

Finally, some technical stuff:


Like all good IT people I always worry about losing data. One problem with changing everyones wallpaper is that we'd lose what was there before. If a user has set their background image from Internet Explorer or Picture Viewer it's entirely possible that the desktop image is the only copy of the file they have.

One thing I know for a fact is that XP can only set BMPs as wallpaper. Even when you set a JPG as a wallpaper, it must first convert it to a BMP. The good news for early adopters is that Vista can use JPGs for wallpaper (but then let's face it, if you're using Vista you'll need all the available RAM you can get).

Well I did a bit of digging and found out where the BMP is stored. It's a BMP file in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\

This could be handy to know.