Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Stealth on September 07, 2005, 04:52:30 pm

Title: recovering data from a user profile
Post by: Stealth on September 07, 2005, 04:52:30 pm

a client's wondering how he can recover his background image from a profile he's got.  he saw an image, right clicked and clicked "SET AS WALLPAPER" in windows XP.  he's got a backup of the whole hard drive, and he's now got a NEW computer, but he wants to have that background image on the new computer, and he doesn't know where to find it.

i'm assuming it's in the documents and settings folder somewhere, in fact i'm almost sure, but i don't know where.  and a search yielded no results.  i'm hoping it's not in one of those encapsulated files with weird extensions
any ideas?

Title: recovering data from a user profile
Post by: StratComm on September 07, 2005, 05:02:24 pm

C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Wallpaper1.bmp

EDIT: right, no angle brackets.

Title: recovering data from a user profile
Post by: Stealth on September 07, 2005, 05:06:00 pm

yeah that's showing the last WINDOWS wallpaper i used... not the last picture i right clicked and went "set as background"

i'm assumign if it's not for me, that it won't be for him either :(

Title: This tip brought to you by Windows Registry
Post by: StratComm on September 07, 2005, 05:21:57 pm

Ah, so it is.  Ok, so try either "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Internet Explorer Wallpaper.bmp" (if they used I.E.) or "C:\WINDOWS\Firefox Wallpaper.bmp" (obviously, firefox) as the program that sets the background is responsible for saving the images and does so in different locations.  If they used a different browser (or even a different version really) all bets are off.  Why the hell Windows still does things in such an archaic manner is a little beyond me, but whatever.  Try that and let me know if it works.

EDIT: for the record, the relavent regestry key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop, string "Wallpaper" with the current value equaling the absolute path to the bmp(!) file used for the desktop.  :ick:

So at any given time for me, Windows has a 14Mb space occupied in memory just for my wallpaper.  That's more RAM than my first couple of computers had COMBINED.  They really need to investigate compressable formats.

Title: recovering data from a user profile
Post by: Stealth on September 07, 2005, 05:44:35 pm

cheers, that worked :)  good job :D

Thanks for the help everyone :)