Dell laptop, Windows 11 Home 24H2 Build 26100.4349
I don’t use my laptop a lot but today (a week after the June Patch Tuesday update) I saw that the desktop had changed from blue colour with slideshow pictures to solid black so I went to ‘Personalise’ and changed it to a blue colour which was okay.
I then tried to reset it from ‘Solid colour’ to ‘Slideshow’ again but it will no longer change. It stays as ‘Solid colour’. See photo.
I ran the tuneup.bat file but it found no integrity violations and no component store corruption. The Chkdsk also found no disk problems.
I have the setting ‘Let slideshow run even when I’m on battery power’ set to ‘On’.
This only happens on my Administrator account.
My wife’s ‘Standard user’ account desktop background had also changed to solid black but I was able to change this to Blue and select ‘Slideshow’ and it changed as selected.
Go to Settings -> System -> Activation and verify Windows is activated. Personalization is not allowed if Windows needs activation. Also try to set a single picture first as background before enabling slideshow. Is the picture folder set in slideshow still valid? Does it contain any pictures? There is a chance if you enabled OneDrive that all your pictures are in OneDrive\Pictures (cloud) instead of the Pictures folder (local). You much change slideshow to point there or copy the pictures in a local folder.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB SATA Device (250 GB, SATA-III)
Internet Speed
VDSL 50 Mbps
Browser
MICROSOFT EDGE
Antivirus
WINDOWS DEFENDER
Other Info
Legacy MBR installation, no TPM, no Secure Boot, no WDDM 2.0 graphics drivers, no SSE4.2, cannot get more unsupported ;) This is only my test laptop. I had installed Windows 11 here before upgrading my main PC. For my main PC I use everyday see my 2nd system specs.
When 24H2 first began to roll out, there was a conflict between the new update not playing well with desktop wallpaper customizations. I thought it only pertained to 3rd party personalization software, but perhaps not. I believe currently any issues are with 3rd party through, pending an update on their end to be compatible with 24H2.
My Computer
At a glance
Windows 11 24H211th gen Intel Core i7-1165G740GB X513EQNNVidia GeForce MX350 \ Intel Iris Xe Graphics
Go to your pictures folder via File Explorer > Select what you want(highlighted) > Right click > Set as desktop background
Then it should work.
Going just to Settings > Personalisation > background without doing that first does not work as expected, using the browse button to the same folder does not list any images, strange, possibly a permissions thing. I use an Admin account.
Go to Settings -> System -> Activation and verify Windows is activated. Personalization is not allowed if Windows needs activation. Also try to set a single picture first as background before enabling slideshow
spapakons was partially correct. After checking that Windows was activated I tried his second tip of setting a single picture and that worked but the 'Slideshow' still would not work when I tried it 10 minutes later. What followed next is just luck.
Because spapakons directed me to Settings I thought "I'll have a look in Windows update while I'm in Settings" and there was an update already sitting there waiting for me to click on 'Download and install'. This was KB5063060, an out-of-band update. I installed the update, which took a while since it is over 3 GB size. See photo.
After installing the update the slideshow worked. It was as if the OS had disable the Slideshow until after the update was installed but it didn't happen on my HP device.
Maybe because my HP device has an AMD CPU and my Dell device has an Intel CPU? They have different graphics drivers. Just guessing. Either way all is okay now.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB SATA Device (250 GB, SATA-III)
Internet Speed
VDSL 50 Mbps
Browser
MICROSOFT EDGE
Antivirus
WINDOWS DEFENDER
Other Info
Legacy MBR installation, no TPM, no Secure Boot, no WDDM 2.0 graphics drivers, no SSE4.2, cannot get more unsupported ;) This is only my test laptop. I had installed Windows 11 here before upgrading my main PC. For my main PC I use everyday see my 2nd system specs.