Microsoft introduced Desktop Slideshow feature with Windows 7 OS and the feature is present in Windows 8 as well. As all of you know, Desktop Slideshow lets you have a slide show of your favorite wallpapers. The feature supports changing of the desktop wallpaper at intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 1 day.Hundreds of theme packs (set of wallpapers) are also available as free download from Windows personalization gallery. The only problem with the feature is that you need to manually right-click on desktop and then click Next desktop background option to switch to the next background in the slideshow.
Sure, you can set the interval in Personalization window but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a shortcut to quickly switch to the next background in the pipeline, without having to open the desktop context menu.
Of course, when you on desktop, you can press Shift + F10 keys followed by N key to switch to the next desktop background but we have a better solution that automates clicking above keys and lets you switch to the next background with a click.
Windows 7 and Windows 8 users who love to have themes will be glad to know that it’s actually possible to create a shortcut to switch to the next desktop background. Just follow the given below steps to create a shortcut to perform “next desktop background” action.
Step 1: Open your Notepad application and then paste the below code in the Notepad.
set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys("^ ")
WshShell.SendKeys("+{F10}")
WshShell.SendKeys("n")
Step 2: Save the file with any name but with .vbs extension. That’s it! You can now do a double-click on the newly created .vbs file to switch to the next desktop background. Users who would like to have a keyboard shortcut need to follow the next two steps as well.Step 3: Right-click on the newly created .vbs file and click Create shortcut to have a shortcut of the the file on desktop.
Step 4: Do a right-click on the shortcut, select Properties. Switch to Shortcut tab, and then enter a hotkey in the Short Key box. Click Apply button.
That’s it! From now onwards, you can use this new shortcut key to switch to the next desktop background. Good luck!
