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 Customize
your desktop (wallpaper)
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Customizing your desktop or wallpaper (it goes by both names) is
really the first place to start on your way to customizing your computer.
It is one of the easiest things you can do.
Turn this:
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into this:
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Your desktop preference is stored in the Display settings area of the
control panel. There are two primary ways to get there:
1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop,
select Properties
or
2. Go to Control Panel | Display
In the display dialog, select the Background
tab.
To select an image, click the browse button on the right.
Some tips for getting a great desktop wallpaper:
1. Start with the highest resoultion image you can find. If you try
to "blow up" a small image, you get what are known as "jaggies"
2. If your image isn't the exact size of your display, don't use the
"stretch" button on the display panel. Use an image editing
program (like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro) to resize the image. The
stretch does a horrible job (more jaggies).
3. If your image is small to begin with, consider keeping it relatively
the same size and offsetting to the side instead of blowing it up and
getting all those jaggies.
4. You can also set the background color of your icon text to match
your desktop (see below). Or better yet, download a utility which will
make the icon text background transparent. Two such utilites are Transparent4
and TransText by Chaos
soft. There are probably more out there...
update (09/16/02): I've been using WindowsFX (v.1.20) by Stardock:
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx/
The transparent windows crashed my Win2k box, but the part that
makes the text background transparent works.
before
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after
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 Related
links:
Here are some places to get images you can use as wallpaper:
DeskMod (down?)
A GREAT source for desktop images.
Desktopian
Another great site for stuff to make modifying your desktop easier
DeviantArt
Everything related to customizing your operating system...
Digital Blasphemy
Beautiful 3D images done by regular people like you and me.
[H]ard
(OCP) Forums desktops thread (dated)
You can see what other nerds, er... people have on for desktops and post
yours for others to see.
Lots of skins
Another site with everything related to customizing
ThinkDan
has a some pretty cool Matrix images if you're into that sort-of thing
Tweak Central desktops section
You can see what I've had on my home desktop for the past year or so
You can download the images too (if my machines are working)
WinCustomize
Another site with everything related to customizing
You can also type "desktop" or "wallpaper" in any
search engine and have more images
than you could possibly sort through
A few notes:
*A note about performance:
The desktop image is (depending on your computer's color depth and how
the bitmap is saved) anywhere from 16 to 32 bits per pixel. Multiply that
by 1024 and then by 768 (or whatever resolution you are running) and you
end up with a pretty large file. My desktop image is 5,626kB. Remember
all this image data has to be stored in memory. If you have an older system
or a system which is short on memory as it is, I recommend skipping any
fancy desktops and perhaps going with a plain color or tiled pattern.
*A note about Active Desktop:
Active Desktop allows you to have images and content other than bitmap
(bmp) files for your desktop. I think you can use HTML content as well.
There used to be a performance loss from using Active Desktop but with
today's faster PC's, it's not really an issue. Nevertheless, I suggest
avoiding Active (anything) Desktop and sticking with bitmaps.
Regardless, here's how to turn it on and off:
1. In Windows 2000:
Right-click anywhere on the desktop,
and select one of the choices in Active Desktop
>
In Windows ME, 98, 98SE and 9x with Active Desktop installed, I think
it's:
Right-click anywhere on the desktop,
check (on) or uncheck (off) "View as Web Page"
or
2. Go to Control Panel | Display and select
the Web tab. Check View
Web content on my Active Desktop
Related
links:
ZDNet
article about Active Desktop
This might get you going in the right (read wrong) direction  .
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