Use Screensavers As Vista Wallpapers

Posted by Martin in Cool, Windows  Tags: , , , , , ,

30

Sep



Windows Vista Ultimate comes with the Dreamscene extra which can turn videos into background screensavers. Several other applications like VLC offer this options as well. A tip was posted over at Tech Recipes today that mentioned a hidden setting in Windows Vista that makes it possible to use any screensaver as a Windows Vista wallpaper.

This hidden setting works in all versions and editions of Windows Vista. All that needs to be done is to execute a single command to execute the screensaver as the Vista wallpaper. The best method is to test run the feature with the default screensavers that are shipped with Windows Vista and use custom ones after making sure that everything is still working properly.

Open a command prompt by pressing Windows R and typing in cmd. Now execute the command aurora.scr /p65552. It can take a few seconds before the changes become apparent. What you should see is the screensaver as the new wallpaper in Windows Vista.

screensaver background

The above screenshot is a snapshot of a Windows Vista 32-bit Home Premium edition running the pc screensaver Analogy as the background image. The screensaver can be killed anytime in the Windows Task Manager where it appears as a process that uses roughly 10 Megabytes of computer memory.

The only side effect of the procedure is that all desktop icons will be hidden for as long as the screensaver is running as the background image.


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5 Users Commented In This Post

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xibex.com says:

cool trick!!

Fedorov says:

Neat! How do you turn it off i.e. reverse the process as I’m sure this must eat the cpu cycles having this running in the background all day long?

Martin says:

Fedorov you have to kill the process in the Windows Vista Task Manager.

Pietzki says:

great trick!

and to get around the drawback of icons disappearing you can just use a program like rocketdock or make a toolbar (create folder on desktop and put all icons/folders in it which you usually have on your desktop, then simply drag the whole folder to the edge of the screen where you want the toolbar)

simply brilliant!

Run Screensaver As Desktop Background says:

[...] made them popular with the release of Dreamscene for Windows Vista Ultimate. We covered ways to use screensavers as Vista wallpapers in the past but the following method works both in Windows XP and Windows [...]

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