I spend most of my time twiddling. Occasionally I lark about, or waste time, but usually I’m twiddling. I’ve been known to muck around on occasion.
Before I ever heard of desktop customization I was changing my wallpaper – the stuff on my computer not the stuff on my walls at home. It’s tough to sneak that home wall covering stuff past the boss every day, so I stuck with the computer version. Yeah, so I’ve been a wallpaper twiddler, oh, for ages now. I am hardly a n00b in the wallpaper area. Changing your wallpaper is the easiest thing to to in desktop customization, and also the one that makes the most obvious (from a distance) change.
I just never knew so much existed out there. Or in here: the Wallpaper Gallery on www.wincustomize.com.
So how do you become a twiddler like me? Well, first you’ve got to download some wallpaper you like. As I’ve mentioned several thousand times before, I particularly like a nice nature scene, or at least something dimensional. Sure, go ahead and give me an outer space scene, just make me feel like it’s got some depth to it. I want to feel as if I could step through my Windows and be sucking vacuum like Schwartzenegger in Total Recall. (And hopefully I would return completely to normal two minutes later, like he did. Yeah right, come on Hollywood; study some science will you?)
No matter what you like in a wallpaper, you can probably find it in the 5902 submissions (at the time I wrote this) in the wallpaper gallery Wallpaper Gallery. When you download a wallpaper make sure you save it in a place you will remember. I always stress this. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known who’ve saved things and then can’t find them later. Two years later they have a gig of information in their temporary files.
When you download your file and have saved it properly it will be in a zipped file. Before you can truly enjoy the fruits of all that long, hard work of downloading you must extract or unzip the files. Believe me, it’s not as much fun as it sounds.
Right click on the file. There should be a command that says “extract all”. If not then should be able to open that zipped folder as if it were a regular folder and just drag or copy the files out. If all else fails, there are plenty of zip programs out there. Stardock also has "ObjectZip" as part of ObjectDesktop.
Once the files are unzipped they are ready to use! There are so many jokes I could make right here, but this is a family program, alas.
Go to your desktop and right click on the background, then click on the "Properties" option. This is the "Display Properties" dialogue window. Click on the “Desktop” tab.
I usually save my wallpaper files into my “My Pictures” folder. Under normal circumstances any pictures you have in your “My Pictures” folder will just show up in the list of wallpapers. This doesn’t seem to be happening on my home computer, and I haven’t yet figured out why as I am so busy with the twiddling. If the pictures don’t show up just click on the browse button.
Find the wallpaper you just downloaded. What screen resolution are you running? Don’t know? Yeah, you’re a newb too. To find out you can click on the “Settings” tab in the Display Properties window. It will tell you what you are running.
If the wallpaper or – as the cool kids call it – the “wall” gives you options of different screen resolutions then pick the one corresponding to what you are running. If you are running 1024 X 768, then pick the 1024 wall. There isn’t a corresponding resolution? Just pick the nearest one and try centering or stretching it. See which one looks best to you.
Now just click “Apply” and you are done!
Nothing to it but to do it. Have fun newbs!
Daily hint for the newb: The easier way to do all this is to download the wallpaper, open it up, right click on it and select “Set as Desktop Background”.
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Check out the other Newbie Tutorials here: #1: Intro., #2: WindowBlinds, Part 1, #3: WindowBlinds, Part 2, #4: Screenshots, #5: IconPackager