plonq: (Plonq @ Work)
[personal profile] plonq
One of the benefits of having administrative rights on both of my work computers is that I can fight back against lame corporate screen savers.

Recently the company created a number of new desktops and screen savers with rail crossing lights and tepid safety messages. These look like they were designed by somebody's middle-school kid as an art project, and they have gone with a "one size fits all" policy, so they will stretch the same picture to fit your 16:9 screen as your 5:4 monitor right next to it. As you can imagine, it looks pretty awful. As an added bonus they recently locked down the screen saver and have it slowly slide an equally badly scaled version of the current backdrop around the screen. It has the cheesy, amateurish look that I have come to expect from EDS.

I have four monitors shared over two computes, so I am surrounded on all sides by the awful. It was driving me up the wall and hampering my productivity, so I pushed back. My desktop wallpaper is now full of ponies. Again.

I have been involved in a a bit of a cat and mouse (or to be more precise, pony and lame) battle with them for the past few weeks. If I delete or rename their scripts and files, they push down replacement ones once or twice a week. If I run a desktop application like, say, DisplayFusion to override their desktops they occasionally kill it remotely. Well, in fairness I don't think they are actively killing it, rather I think it is collateral damage from their half-assed registry hacks.

So far I have been holding the upper hand in the battle. When I returned from MFF this week I found my desktops intact, but they had managed to override the login screens. Their horrible screen savers were active too (they finally managed to kill my BSOD screen saver). So far it appears like my latest strategy is largely working though - that is, instead of deleting or renaming their files, I have replaced their collection of backdrop pictures with ponies bearing the same file names.

We'll see how my latest fix for the screen saver works. I returned from coffee to blank screens all around, which is better than nothing. Well, technically a blank screen is nothing, so I guess it is better than something.

Date: 2011-11-23 07:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] shockwave77598.livejournal.com
They don't bother to check the file sizes? tsk tsk tsk -- their own fault :)

Date: 2011-11-23 11:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kfops.livejournal.com
Replacing your replaced files?

Heck, that nothing a little script and from job couldn't take care of! P0wnies for all.

Date: 2011-11-24 07:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dronon.livejournal.com
In our old office I was able to replace the corporate screen saver once I located the Shockwave file and replaced it with something else (as long as it had the same filename), but now I have no idea how it's been implemented. Might even be loading from a remote server or something. :-/

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