Rafael Rivera has done it again. In case you were wondering, yes, this is exactly why I’ve asked him to help write “Windows 7 Secrets”.
Curious as to what else was under Microsoft’s elaborate lock, key, and duct-tape protection scheme mentioned earlier, I had my friend Chris Holmes run a scan of his 7 system, as I’m still babying my laptop’s SSD drive. What we found were ties into system files littered across the entire operating system. Post-analysis revealed another feature tucked away in the corner – Say hello to (what I think should be called) Desktop Slideshow.
Desktop Slideshow, at least in build 6801, supports changing of the desktop wallpaper at intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 1 day. For a bit of variation, you can tick the Shuffle checkbox to have Windows 7 randomly pick a wallpaper for you. And to keep from sapping the life out of your laptop, you can choose to pause the slideshow when you’re on limited reserve. Think of this as Dreamscene, but without the ensuing nightmares.
For those of us that don’t have terabytes of imagery to keep your desktop fresh, you have a new source in the Picture location dropdown labeled Feeds. From this interface, you can choose an RSS feed and automatically download fresh images, like NASA’s Large Image of the Day, to your desktop. At time of writing, however, this feature was not completely functional.
Awesome stuff. Check out the original post for a cool video too.