Tired of the old standard “field of grass and a hill” desktop in Windows XP? Every time I see it, I look for the Droid army advancing over the hill (from the Star Wars Episode 1 movie).
You can customize your desktop easily to use any other picture that you’d like as your desktop background.
HOW?
Just right-click on any blank part of the desktop — that is, any part that is not an icon — and select Properties from the popup “context menu.”
Then, in the Display Properties dialog box that appears, click the Desktop tab.
The Desktop tab has a small monitor image that will display your current selection for the desktop background.
You can pick any of the entries in the Background scroll-box. Just left-click on one and it will show in the small monitor.
Some are sized for your screen, while others aren’t! That’s where the “Position” pulldown is used — you can pick Center, Tile or Stretch.
Center centers the image in the screen and uses the selected Color (from the selection box just below the Position pulldown) for the rest of the screen.
Tile will repeat the image to fill up the screen, without any resizing. You will probably end up with partial repeated images at the right side and bottom.
Stretch will stretch the image to fit your selected display size (e.g. 1024×768). Stretching may be the best choice for regular monitors. However, if you take a regular photo and stretch it to fit a widescreen monitor, you may not like the results (landscapes usually look OK, but people look short and wide!).
You can also use your own photos, or images you download, as your desktop background. Use the “Browse” button to find your picture, click on the picture so that its filename shows in the “File name:” box in the Browse window. Then click the Open button in the Browse window. This will switch you back to the Display Properties dialog box, where you’ll see your selection in the small preview monitor.
If you like it, click Apply and then OK. If you don’t, you can stretch or tile the image — or pick another.
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