Looking for a way to remove your desktop wallpaper from your Windows PC? If you’ve ever changed your Windows wallpaper, you’ve probably noticed the incredible amount of useless wallpapers that come with the system by default. I have NEVER used the built-in wallpapers and therefore wanted to find a way to delete them permanently!
This is probably a gimmick for most people, but if you want to get the most out of your car, it might be worth your time.
If you right click on your desktop, select Personalize and click Desktop Background at the bottom, you will see all the default wallpapers included in the system listed there. In Windows 7 you have categories like Architecture, Characters, etc.
In Windows 8, you have more annoying categories like flowers, lines and colors. Again, I would prefer that all of these wallpapers are not displayed.
Windows 10 has another set of newly created wallpapers that will go on sale this summer. Fortunately, deleting a wallpaper is as easy as navigating to the desired folder and deleting whatever is there.
How to remove desktop backgrounds
Windows XP has several places where these annoying wallpapers are stored. In Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, all wallpapers are stored in one place. The main place to look in every version of Windows is:
C: Windows Web Wallpaper
In this folder, you will see the default wallpaper installed on the system. In Windows XP, you will see several JPG and BMP images, the most famous of which is Bliss.bmp, which is the default desktop background for this operating system.
In Windows 7 and later, you can find several folders and these are the categories I mentioned above.
Now you can simply delete all images in that folder and they will be removed from the desktop background dialog the next time you open it. If you think you really want to use the wallpaper later, you can simply cut it and paste it into a temporary folder. Copy them later so they appear on the list again.
One of the issues you may run into when trying to remove wallpaper on Windows 7, 8, or 10 is an error message that says you need permission from TrustedInstaller first.
This is a major annoyance in later versions of Windows, and is intended to prevent non-tech people from messing up the system by deleting important system files. To delete files or folders, you must first take ownership of yourself and then grant yourself Full Control permissions. Fortunately, I have already written a detailed article on how to delete files protected by TrustedInstaller
If you want to add your own wallpaper to the C: Windows Web Wallpaper directory, you can do so, but you will have to follow the same procedure and reset the permissions for the Wallpaper directory. After that, you can copy any JPG image files and they should appear in the desktop background dialog.
As you can see, inside the wallpaper folder, I also created a My Wallpaper folder. Instead of the default wallpapers included with Windows, you can add a bunch of your favorites. Obviously, you can add images from anywhere by simply clicking the Browse button and navigating to that folder, but here you need to customize the appearance of the dialog so that it displays your custom wallpapers instead of the default ones.
By the way, Windows XP also has a set of wallpapers stored in the C: Windows directory. Be careful because there are many important files in the Windows directory and you don’t want to accidentally delete them. Note that you only want to delete the .BMP files, so leave everything else alone.
My advice would be to browse the catalog in thumbnail mode and then slowly browse and remove the wallpaper as it appears.
This is how you can remove the background wallpaper from Windows if you like. This is not something most people would want to do, but if you like to tinker like me, it will be a fun little experiment. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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