How to Set a Screensaver as the Desktop Background


You want to set your favorite screensaver as a background to pep up your Windows desktop during a presentation. Windows however does not allow this at all. How to make it work?  Here is a simple command prompt which will make it work and it’s quite simple to do..

  • Open Start > All programs > Accessories > Command Prompt.
  • Using the “cd“ (change directory) command, change to the "system32" folder within the Windows installation directory.
  • Type the command ribbons.scr /p65552 and confrm it with [Enter].
  • The screen saver appears immediately as an eye-catching desktop background.

screensaver as desktop in vista

All icons however disappear and the right mouse key is rendered ineffective with Vista. This is the price you pay for a peppy background. 

On the other hand, this has an advantage since nobody can see the icons that you have stored on your desktop and will be especially interesting for presentations or training programs. You can use most of the Windows screensavers as desktop backgrounds thanks to the “/p65552” parameter.

To terminate the animated desktop, open the Task Manager with [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] and click on the process with the same name. Select the relevant entry, “ribbon” in our example, in the “Applications” tab and click “End task”.

A restart also stops the screensaver. You can also start the animated  background by using a batch file, this is particularly helpful if it is to be used frequently and saves you from working with the archaic command prompt.

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