Windows 2003 Terminal Services Wallpaper on Dell Servers
I do a lot of remote administration of servers using Terminal Services. On Dell servers with Windows Server 2003, the logon wallpaper is this 2 MB .bmp file of a Dell server.
It’s pretty. Pretty annoying, that is. You have to wait for each block of image to be sent across your network connection, watching each little piece of the image fill in.
So, replace that image will a solid color and wait times go away!
Here’s what I did:
- Use Paint to make a black.bmp with size 10 x 10 and filled with solid black. Saved in c:\windows.
- Opened regedit and found
HKEY USERS\ .DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
- Changed the Wallpaper key to my black.bmp filename
- Set TileWallPaper to 1
- Close regedit, log off server, reconnect.
Just changing the Administrator wallpaper won’t change this! This registry key was the only way I found to remove logon wallpaper in Windows Server 2003.
For servers that I only access remotely, I use this method. However, if you’ve got a set of servers that you access via KVM or via multiple Terminal Services connections, it’s helpful to put the server name on the background and use different colors to make identification easier.
Hey, if you don’t know what HKEY USERS is, you probably shouldn’t be fooling with your registry. Consider yourself warned.
UPDATE: Lots of people have found this useful and have had their suggestions on how to make it better. If you have a better way to do it, please let me know! Here are some other ways:
- Delete the registry entry.
- Save over the system32\dellwall.bmp file with your smaller file.
- Pick “(None)” for the selection in the display options (this one didn’t remove the wallpaper from the connection screen, only the desktop once I’d logged in.)
