sp.exe sets your Windows desktop wallpaper and background colour. It also turns off Active Desktop, enables centered wallpaper rather than tiled, and turns off wallpaper stretching if enabled.

It could be used as a simple way of distributing and enforcing a fixed desktop wallpaper and colour across a business. Put a line to run sp.exe in the global login script, and each machine will be set back to your chosen design as the user logs in.

Similarly, you can use sp.exe to set your backdrop when a system administrator has disabled the desktop background option on your machine.

Example:

sp.exe FFFFFF h:\system\wallpaper.bmp

The "FFFFFF" is the hex value for the colour white - it's comprised of three hex values of FF, FF and FF for Red, Green and Blue respectively. In case you don't know how hexadecimal works, some common colour values are listed below:

000000 black
FFFFFF white
FF0000 red
00FF00 green
0000FF blue
FFFF00 yellow
FF00FF magenta
00FFFF cyan
808080 grey

The final parameter is the path to the bitmap to be used as the wallpaper. This has to be a bmp file as sp.exe turns off Active Desktop.

sp.zip (54k)