Wallpaper change to fit resolution - XP?

[Duke]

Hi all,

 

I've just updated the wallpaper staff and students get to some nice photos of the school. Students are no problem because they all log on to desktop PCs with 17" or 19" monitors running at 1280x1024 - thus get a wallpaper of that resolution and it looks fine.

 

However, although staff use PCs with the same monitors, in the classroom the teacher's PC is set to 1024x768 as this is the resolution the projectors run at (it goes through a splitter so it's not like there's two video outputs we can run at different resolutions). When they log on in their office where there's no projector they get the correct native 1280x1024.

 

As such, the wallpaper I made at 1024x768 for the classroom look rubbish in the office because it has to scale up. If I did it the other way around it'd look bad in the classroom scaled down. There's text on the new wallpapers so it's particularly noticeable, and having the wallpaper tiled or centred rather than stretched wouldn't look right or would cut off some of the text.

 

Wallpapers are set through group policy per-user and staff can't change them themselves. Does anyone know of a way to get around this issue? Clients are running XP SP3.

 

Many thanks in advance,

 

Chris

[Duke]

To get round resolution issues I have the wallpaper saved on the C: of the local machine. Then use GPO to point to this file. So you could have a 1024 version on classroom PCs and 1280 on the office machines.

 

Hmm, good idea. How do you push the wallpaper out to all PCs, and do you find storing it locally is an issue if you want to update it? We've got about 800 PCs so I'd need a reliable way to ensure they all get the right one.

[denon101]

I just made a script that will push out the desktops to each machine and store it locally on the pc. A simple xcopy script does the job nicely. Could use robocopy or what ever you fancy really.

[sted]

md c:\windows\wallpaper

copy \\server\wallpaper$\desktop1.bmp c:\windows\wallpaper\desktop1.bmp /y

 

set as startup script then everytime a pc is powered on it will take desktop1 from the server and overwrite whatever was there

[maniac]

This script that I use will copy the necessary wallpaper from a depository depending on the screen resolution of the local machine. Literally just save them in a directory that is the right resolution e.g "\\server\share\wallpapers\1024x768\"

 

My actual version is a bit different and includes a check to see if the master file has been changed before it tries to copy it, this save un-necessary file copying over the network. That's part of a bigger script however so would take me a while to separate

 

Hope this might be useful.

 

'COPY WALLAPAPERS SCRIPT

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

'CHECK TO SEE IF FOLDER EXITS, IF NOT CREATE IT
If Not objFSO.FolderExists("c:\WALLPAPERS\" ) then objFSO.CreateFolder("C:\WALLPAPERS")

'FIND OUT RESOLUTION
Set objWMIService = GetObject("Winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * From Win32_DesktopMonitor where DeviceID = 'DesktopMonitor1'",,0)
For Each objItem in colItems
intHorizontal = objItem.ScreenWidth
intVertical = objItem.ScreenHeight
Next 
res=intHorizontal & "x" & intvertical

'COPY CORRECT WALLPAPERS FROM SERVER
objFSO.CopyFolder "\\domain\netlogon\WALLPAPERS\" & res , "C:\WALLPAPERS" , OverWriteFiles

 

Mike.

[Duke]

You guys are awesome, cheers! Certainly given me a few ideas and much appreciated.

[ricki]

Hi

 

Put it in the startup and log on script and use bginfo. It works great have a look here for further information BgInfo

 

Richard

[PEO]

this script dosent work for me Im getting path not found. can anyone help?