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If you’re managing a ton of machines then you probably have a hard time remembering just how much RAM they have, or which OS version each one is, or any of a dozen other little details that can easily escape your mind. An elegant solution for people like myself who have the short term memory of a mosquito is BGInfo. BGInfo crafts a background image that includes all of the above information plus pretty much anything else you want it to show.
Now, that being said, I continually hear from people who are having trouble running BGInfo across their entire network when their users don’t have admin rights. Thanks to Jschubert on the Sysinternals forums we have a very handy solution:

Adding the following line to your batch file should work to change the permissions on the .bmp file bginfo creates. You may need to change c:\winnt to c:\windows depending on how your computers are setup.

cacls c:\winnt\bginfo.bmp /E /G everyone:F

The only concern I have is that it might not work because your users may not have the correct group membership (I think they may need to be administrators). So instead of putting the line in your users’ batch file, here is another suggestion.

1. Open a cmd prompt
2. Type in net view > view.txt (this will pipe a list of all your networked computers to a text file).
3. Open the view.txt file in Excel
4. Delete all text ecept for the computer names
5. Insert a colum in front of the computer names and behind the computer name.
6. In the new first colum, add the text “cacls \\”
7. In the new last coumn, add the text “c$\winnt\bginfo.bmp /E /G everyone:F
8. Use the auto fill tool to fill in all the cells before and after the computer names with the appropriate text.
9. Close the Excel file choosing to save your changes.
10. Open the view.txt document in Word
11. Choose Replace from the Edit menu
12. Click on the More button and then the Special button
13. Choose the Tab Character
14. That will put the tab character in the Find What field. In the Replace with field, leave a space (tap the space bar once).
15. Click on Replace All.
16. That should leave you with a bunch of lines that look like “cacls \\computername\c$\winnt\bginfo.bmp /E /G everyone:F”
17. Between the first and second line and the third and fourth line add the word Pause. This will pause the script a couple of times before it runs completely. That will allow you to view the file’s first couple of tries at modifying the bginfo.bmp file. If you see an error message instead of the message ‘file processed’ you’ll know you have to fix up something.
18. Close Word, chooseing to save your changes.
19. Rename the file to something like cacls.bat.
20. Double click on it to make it run and it should change the permissions on the bginfo.bmp file for every computer. (You should be running it from an account that has administrator access).

This will allow all of your users to update the bginfo.bmp file and provide a handy reference screen whenever you have to check out a PC.