Bginfo on Anything About IT

Windows 8: Boot Time in BGINFO

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:41:22 +0000

Last week I noticed that the Boot Time shown on my BGInfo generated desktop wallpaper had a date of several days ago. This is because of the new Fast Startup feature introduced with Windows 8.

In short, when you shutdown Windows 8 the kernel session is hibernated, so the next time you power on your computer the system starts from that hibernated session. When you initiate a Restart then the system does not hibernate the kernel session but really performs a cold boot. The default boot time shown in BGInfo only shows the cold boot time.

How to use vbscripts in BGINFO

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:47:45 +0000

Out of the box BGINFO includes a number of predefined fields that can be used to display information on the desktop such as Computer name, IP Address etc. But if the standard fields aren’t enough,BGINFO allows creating custom fields that can pull data from various sources like WMI, Registry, File content, Environment variables or VBScript.

The below example shows how to embed VBSCRIPT code output in BGINFO. First we create a VBSCRIPT file called comp.vbs that has the following content. (Credit for the script goes to Moral Volcano)

BGInfo Template for XenDesktop 5

Sun, 22 May 2011 22:48:26 +0000

During the past weeks I have spend a bit of time with Citrix XenDesktop 5 and while I was busy creating Desktop Groups, updating Master images, I thought i t could be helpful to see some information directly on the desktop. Show things on the desktop?, okay that’s a no-brainer, BGInfo from Sysinternals is what we need.

So I created a template for BGInfo that just shows the information I need when using XenDesktop.