Best way to change your Windows 7 Starter wallpaper – found!

Much as I’m a Linux geek at heart, I will happily confess that Windows 7 is easily the best version of that veritable Operating System, by a mile. On my little netbook it just flies, works faultlessly and does just what a good Operating System should do – let me get on with stuff and be as unobtrusive as possible.

But there is one niggle with the Starter Edition it came shipped with. It’s annoying, but not enough of an annoyance to merit the bloat of an upgrade – the perfect definition of “niggle”.

It’s that damned stupid decision of Microsoft to disable being able to change your own desktop wallpaper. Why, in the name of all that’s holy, would pissing people off by randomly limiting stuff like this ever work as a means to entice folks to upgrade? At best, you’ve annoyed a loyal customer. At worse, folks will use that as a (flimsy) excuse to hit the torrent sites for a more feature-packed version of Windows 7. It’s a lose-lose situation for Microsoft all of their own making.

But there is another way.

Actually, there are several, but most require installing Stardock My Colors, a complete (and memory resident) theme switcher for Windows 7. That’s just a bit too much of a sledgehammer for my liking; all I want to do is change the wallpaper!

Enter Starter Background Changer. It’s a mere 733k download which (when installed) adds a Personalize option to your menu when you right-click on the Desktop and a To Choose like Desktop (yeah, bad translation I know – this app has a few but I’ll forgive them that, in spades) option when you right-click an image. Select multiple images at once and you can set your wallpaper to cycle through them at fixed intervals too.

In short, it acts just as nature intended – pick an image and you can set it as your wallpaper. Done.

Niggle solved!