On the Difficulty of setting the Windows 7 Desktop Wallpaper

You need to be a software engineer to precisely and correctly set the Windows background in Windows 7.

I have a multi-monitor setup, and I use a very particular method for laying out windows on my secondary screen: I have them cascaded, from the top-left corner of the screen towards the bottom right, such that a little of the bottom-left corner of every window is visible on-screen at all times, like this:

The corners form a mechanism for switching between windows based on spatial layout. Certain windows, such as terminals, browsers, email apps, etc. have "natural" dimensions. Browsers generally like to be page-shaped; terminal windows are quite squat; documentation browsers are somewhere in between, with a treeview on the left and a content pane on the right. These natural shapes guide their spatial positioning. So, all my terminal windows end up cascaded one after the other on at the top left of the screen, followed by Firefox's downloads window, then my bug tracker client, then Thunderbird, then MSDN documentation, with Firefox at the bottom-right, filling the full height of the screen.

Switching between applications based on their spatial layout turns out to usually be more efficient than almost any other scheme, particularly when one's hands aren't on the keyboard. Even alt-tab doesn't distinguish very clearly between different instances of e.g. a terminal app, when in fact each one may be logged in via ssh to different machines and thus it matters very much which one I select.

This scheme works well enough, but the bottom-left corners can get a little ragged. To make aligning the corners easier, I have a special wallpaper which consists of a line carefully placed so that it shows up on the bottom-left corner of my second monitor. When the wallpaper mode is set to "tile", a wallpaper which is big enough to cover the entire desktop area will show up at the expected offset, and everything works out OK.

This wallpaper, a 16-colour bitmap, is so small when compressed that I can embed it here uuencoded directly:

begin 644 wallpaper2.bmp.bz2
M0EIH.3%!629365%3W2<`1PST[.0U0`!`0!`"`0!``!``0`!$``,(L`#9`0JC
M4#1HR::%&C(&C3(T"E4TAM30`&=?M"6=)(E^T$2WA+9$L*JDF-E$NG?'AI55
M0/>6^L(CB*T(550`Q-.DJ".(B"O,*JH`8F(WU0$<@^P((\>[801S_$;<:YG'
:LR**SC<GG'.8JJ@!M,13_%W)%.%"045/=)P`
`
end

If you save that to a file with a '.uue' extension, many common archivers, such as WinZip or WinRar, will be able to open it up. Here's what the meat of it looks like, anyway:

However, it turns out, if you try to set this background using the "Personalization" Control Panel applet in Windows 7, it does some helpful "conversions" on it: it appears to round-trip the damn bitmap through JPG, resulting in artefacts. I've enhanced a zoom of the line after Windows has butchered it:

The line looks unclean, and in particular, it ends up with wave of intensity throughout its length, which is quite distracting and not the desired effect.

Things can get worse though; if you try to use Windows Photo Viewer to set the background using the original bitmap, it will actually resize the thing down to fit the dimensions of your primary monitor (!!!), all but zooming the line out of existence. This drove me up the wall for about 20 minutes, as I tried to figure out where my line had gone when I first transitioned from XP to Windows 7.

The easiest way I currently know to correctly set the Windows 7 desktop wallpaper is to write a program that uses the SystemParametersInfo function directly, to ensure the bits get through unmolested.

I have a lot more Windows 7 annoyances where this came from, but this one cost me quite a bit of time, so it sticks out. My verdict on Windows 7 is pretty mixed. Many applications, particularly games, are incompatible, and overall I dislike the shell compared to XP, especially Windows Explorer and the Vista-esque Start Menu. About the best things I can say in favour of the move is having less concern about future compatibility, and having a 64-bit mode that mostly works, despite all the horrific hacks going on beneath the covers to make it happen. Oh, and I'm running with UAC disabled. I can only take so many access denied errors as I poke around the system before I crack - and command-line apps generally just give you the error, rather than popping up an elevation prompt.