Digital Signage – Slideshow Edition

Recently we purchased a 42″ plasma and a eee Box desktop PC to use as digital signage.  While waiting for our carpenters to mount the TV we decided to use it to display a slideshow for our Annual Antique Car Show.  Instead or re-inventing the wheel I loaded the pictures to the PC and used windows photo viewer to run a slideshow.  This worked so well that one of our branch stores decided they wanted the same setup at their car show.  Now, I wanted to make setup as easy as possiable.  I wasnt looking forward to driving out to set it up, so I needed a way for the PC to automatically start the slideshow when it booted into Windows.  Keeping in line with my “Don’t re-invent teh wheel” philosophy, I again used a built in feature in Windows.  I set up the Slideshow screensaver in XP to run 1 minute after booting and load the car show pictures.  And seeing how it was going to be a headless setup there was no reason for the screensaver to stop.

So todays lesson for all is dont try to overcomplicate something, If you have the tools available use them.