If you have a multi-monitor setup you might have encountered an annoying bug that exists within Windows 11 since at least Windows 8. Your wallpaper (called background in later versions of Windows) will change to a blank dark background once your monitor wakes up from its sleep state.
Lets say you have 3 monitors; the middle monitor has your favorite background, while the other 2 have a dark, solid background to avoid distractions. You set your monitors to sleep within 10 minutes and walk away from your desk, only to return later and discover your main monitor’s background is gone and is now black.
How To Prevent Your Background From Changing
- Navigate to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows
- You’ll typically see two images there named img0.jpg and img19.jpg.
- Simply copy your favorite background to this folder and then right click it and choose “Set as desktop background“.
If you have more than one monitor, your background will change for all connected monitors. If wish to have different background for the other connected monitors, follow these steps:
- Go to C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes
- You’ll see files named Transcoded_XXX. Delete all of those.
- Set your background for each monitor and restart Windows.
- After doing this, the folder should now regenerate with one file per wallpaper, and Windows will stop blanking them out after sleep
2 Comments
Three years plus of this shit and they ain’t gonna fix it, thanks to Dr. Death Gates over at Micropeeny
The guide was just updated with a better method for the multi-monitor setup!