I’ve used BGInfo plenty of times in my past – it’s been a pretty good tool at providing information to technicians in order to assist with end-users’ woes. But overall I’ve only really used it on servers – it’s been helpful to color coordinate based on PRODUCTION vs non-production systems (eg RED and BOLD lettering for the hostname).

I also had a login script that would automatically run BGInfo from our sysvol scripts folder on users’ workstations. However, due to remote users – especially in this Covid time – the login script would not run/update accordingly. I needed to find a new way.

At first I looked at registry edits and tried to run in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, but with my syntax of:

"C:\scripts\BGInfo\workstation.bgi /timer:0 /silent /nolicprompt"

On the workstation BGInfo would open with a default settings rather than my workstation.bgi ones. I’m fairly certain I had the bgi associated properly, but I didn’t look further into it as I went in a different direction: Scripts.

• Navigate to the all-users Startup
  • C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\
• Create a file called hidden.vbs and populate with
  • Set MyScript = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
  • MyScript.Run "c:\windows\bginfo\bginfo.bat", 0, False
• Copy the BGinfo64.exe and associated configuration.bgi to
  • C:\Windows\bginfo\
• Create a file called bginfo.bat in this same directory above
  • @echo=off
  • reg add HKU\.DEFAULT\Software\Sysinternals\BGInfo /v EulaAccepted /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  • pushd %~dp0
  • pushd c:\windows\bginfo
  • cls
  • Bginfo64.exe configuration_client.bgi /TIMER:00 /nolicprompt
  • popd
  • exit
• Log off/Log on to see the changes

The only issue with this avenue is that if we ever decide to update our .bgi configuration file, we’d have to push updates to all systems to have them reflect the changes. Good thing for RMM tools!