How in the Tech

Put Your System Information on the Desktop

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 9, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Customization

Microsoft doesn’t typically make it painless to check or verify system settings, often times involving numerous clicks and that’s only if you know where to click in the first place. Determining the network address, computer name, or free hard drive space are all located in different areas of Windows – even though it all fits under the generic label of system information. As an IT professional that must support remote users and servers, this type of information is invaluable to have at a glance – either with my own or the user’s eyes on the other end of the phone. Some turn to desktop gadgets or widgets to provide easy access to the information but this carries unnecessary overhead to your system resources. Aren’t their better ways to do this?

Sysinternals BgInfo provides an effective solution to the problem – display the information on your desktop; readily available when you need it, but out of sight out of mind when you don’t. What makes BgInfo so unique is that it actually isn’t a continually running process that has to project the information to your desktop. Rather, the program overlays the information onto your physical wallpaper image – creating a new static image that then becomes your wallpaper. Once the process completes, BgInfo exits – leaving your system resources literally unaffected. The displayed information can be configured by font, size, alignment, and positioning with respect to your existing desktop.

It should be clear now that the information on the desktop may not accurately reflect the current state of the system but most information is actually static anyways. However, it is certainly possible to schedule regular executions of BgInfo through Windows Task Scheduler. Alternatively, and what I do, you may place BgInfo into my Windows Startup folder so that it can be executed upon login.

The software works on all versions of Windows from 2000 and on and is free.