Are you one of those who love to see beautiful desktop wallpapers, constantly updated images of the best quality? Then you will probably get carried away Windows Spotlight, Microsoft’s service that provides premium wallpapers, which the software giant integrates into various of its products. In Windows, you can find this in the Personalization preferences. The problem is… it fails, leaves you hanging, and solving it doesn’t seem within the reach of mere mortals.

This option is in the «Personalization> Background> Customize Background> section. Windows Recommended Content» (in «Settings» or directly through the context menu on the desktop) and does this by putting «Selected Windows content, Windows Spotlight, in charge of the desktop background, a wallpaper that will look like and that will be Refreshed daily. After activating this option, the “More information about this image” icon will appear on the screen… And no, it is not advisable to remove it, because it allows you to quickly change the image and provides interesting information.

The invention is very cool, but… what happens if it fails? It happened to me. From one day to the next, the wallpaper has stopped updating and no matter how much I looked at the available options, I went from one to the other and let the matter run its course… Until I did what we all do – or should do – when I had enough: look for solutions on the Internet. But what I found, I must admit, scared me. I take this opportunity to say that there may be a simple and effective solution, but…

But what I found there is not exactly what one expects from a system like Windows. For example, this tutorial from How To Geek, published this year (the most recent thing I’ve seen, that’s why I included it) and the story of the pure landr. There are easier means, but they all involve touching the registry at some point or doing things like that… to change the wallpaper? The joke is obviously very bad.

In the somewhat older article Make Use Of, they go further if possible: «A fresh installation of Windows can solve many problems. Windows functions fail frequently, and often for no apparent reason. Additionally, the solutions designed to solve the problems don’t seem to work. In these cases, a fresh installation of Windows is required. So, if you’ve tried all the fixes above and Windows Spotlight still isn’t working, install a fresh copy of Windows. This joke is even worse.”

In short, since I’m not here to waste time with these weird stories, what I did and I recommend you do the same is that the same thing happens to you and you come here hoping that maybe I can find a solution (although I’m honest and already I tell you that it is better not to complicate things, from the same owner), is … to install). Dynamic themea free app available in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and Windows 11 that I’ve already talked about in these pieces, so I’ll save it now.

If anything, I will say that not only does it work better than the native Windows feature, but it offers more customization options, allowing for things like syncing used images, among other things. Then only with its installation and use The Windows Spotlight background will automatically refresh in the native function to return to it. How long the miracle lasts, I don’t know anymore… I don’t even want to know, but even if it’s for a while, the miracle works.

On the other hand, this method has the obvious disadvantage of loading up the memory of another application that shouldn’t be necessary, but Windows is so crappy that it’s what’s there for those who don’t want to get involved in such nonsense (not even on Linux, hey !) if you encounter the described problem.