The desktop wallpaper can be used as Start screen background

Jul 5, 2013 08:49 GMT  ·  By
Start screen wallpaper dimming is turned on by default in Windows 8.1 Preview
   Start screen wallpaper dimming is turned on by default in Windows 8.1 Preview

Windows 8.1 Preview brought not only a Start button, but also several new Start screen customization options, including the possibility to use the desktop background as a wallpaper.

While this feature could clearly come in handy to many Windows 8 adopters, it appears that some of them are now looking into ways to disable the wallpaper dimming effect loaded when launching the Start screen.

“I was able to set my desktop wallpaper as background for the start screen with no problem, but why does the image dim when going from the desktop to Start, and how can I stop the image from going dim when switching to the Start screen?” one user asks on the support forums.

Unfortunately, no such option is available for the time being, but background dimming pretty much makes sense because this is the only way to make the live tiles more visible.

Microsoft hasn’t said a thing about implementing this kind of settings in the final version of 8.1, so we most likely have to wait until October to find out if the option is there.

There are plenty of options expected to be introduced in Windows 8.1 and Microsoft actually wants to go this route in order to fix the majority of annoyances found in Windows 8, so it will be interesting to see how the upcoming OS version will address user feature requests.