Personalize Your Work Environment in Windows Vista

May 5, 2008

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Microsoft Windows Vista: Visual QuickStart Guide, 2nd Edition

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Setting the Desktop Background

You can change the image, or wallpaper, that appears under the icons on your desktop. If you don't like the desktop backgrounds that Windows or your PC manufacturer provides, you can use one of your own pictures.

To set the desktop background:

Choose Start > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization > Desktop Background (Figure 4.10).

Figure 4.10 By default, Windows looks for background pictures in your personal Pictures folder (\Users\username\Pictures), the shared Pictures folder (\Users\Public\Pictures), and \Windows\Web\Wallpaper.

or

Right-click an empty area of the desktop and choose Personalize > Desktop Background.
Choose a location from the Picture Location drop-down list, and click the picture or color that you want for your background.

or

To use your own picture, click Browse, find the picture file on your computer or network, and then double-click it to make it your background. It will appear in the list of desktop backgrounds.
In the How Should the Picture Be Positioned? section, choose an option:

Resize the image to fit your screen (with some distortion). This option works best with large images and photos.

Tile the image repeatedly over the entire screen. This option works best with small images.

Center the image on the desktop background.
If you chose to center the image in the preceding step, click Change Background Color to select a desktop color to fill the space unoccupied by the picture.
Click OK.

TIPs

You can use bitmap (.bmp/.dib) or JPEG (.jpeg/.jpg) files as background pictures.
If you choose Solid Colors from the Picture Location drop-down list, the More button lets you pick a custom color.
To make any picture on your computer your desktop background, right-click the picture and choose Set As Desktop Background.
To use a web image as wallpaper, right-click the image in Internet Explorer and choose Set As Background. The downloaded image appears in the Picture Location list. Each new internet image you define as a background replaces the old one.
To save a web image permanently and use it as wallpaper, right-click the image in Internet Explorer, choose Save Picture As, save the image in Pictures or a folder of your own, and then proceed as described.
Go to "Managing Visual Effects and Performance" later in this chapter and experiment with Use Drop Shadows for Icon Labels on the Desktop to see which setting makes your desktop icons' text labels easier to read against your background.

Resizing Desktop Images

If the photos from your digital camera are larger than your screen, here's how to trim them to use as wallpaper:

Right-click an empty area of your desktop and choose Personalize > Display Settings.
Under Resolution (bottom left), note the number of pixels (for example, 1024 x 768).
Find the icon or thumbnail of the image that you want to use for wallpaper, and hover the pointer over it until its file-information tooltip appears. (Alternatively, right-click the icon and choose Properties > Details tab > Dimensions property.)

Dimensions gives the image's width and height size in pixels (for example, 1600 x 1200).

If the image's dimensions exceed your computer's screen resolution, Windows fills your screen with the center portion of the image, and the edges go wherever leftover pixels go. This result will be fine with you if the image edges are uninteresting. But if you want the uncropped image to be your wallpaper, make a copy and use the Resize function of a graphics program (Windows Paint, GIMP, or Adobe Photoshop, for example) to shrink it to the same size as your screen (or close).

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