by David Hakala
The Active Desktop feature, available in Windows since Windows 98, allows the use of many kinds of files as the desktop background. Before Active Desktop, only static bitmap (BMP) images could be used as desktop backgrounds. Now your background can be a live Web page constantly updated with news, weather, and sports; a movie file; or just about anything you can display.
But who stares at their desktop background all day? Most users find a static image is all the diversion they need or have time to glance at in between opening and closing application windows.
Active Desktop consumes significant resources even when no active content is being displayed. Disabling Active Desktop can give your computer a noticeable performance boost.
Unfortunately, since Windows XP came out it has been more difficult to disable Active Desktop. You have to edit the registry.
You can disable Active Desktop for just one user or for all users of a machine. To prepare to disable Active Desktop for just the current user,
Click Start then Run and enter regedit
Navigate to the following “current user” key:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]
Active Desktop
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]
Right-click in the right-hand window and click on “New” for a pulldown list of new items you can create. Select new “DWORD”.
Enter “NoActiveDesktop” as the key name, without quotes.
Double-click on the NoActiveDesktop key to change its value. A value of “1” enforces this restriction. A value of “0” allows Active Desktop.
Even Microsoft has discontinued Active Desktop in Vista. In its place is Vista’s Windows Sidebar, a “widget engine” that appears as a sidebar to the side of the desktop. It enables display of active content such as clocks and CPU usage. Several widgets ship with Vista but anyone can develop a widge that will run in the Windows Sidebar.
If you just can’t stand the same old desktop background all the time, try a wallpaper changer such as Wallpaper Master. You can select a group of images that will be rotated as your background at preset intervals or when certain events occur.
David Hakala has written technology tutorials since 1988, in addition to tech journalism, profitable content, documentation, and marketing collateral.
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