Windows Wallpaper

Wallpaper

GaplekNews--To those of us who work with MS Windows on a day to day basis, staring at the same Windows wallpaper, whether the solid blue screen or the pastoral scenes, can be anything but soothing. Unless you happen to work in an environment that has everything locked down, which can be an irritation in itself, it’s easy to inject a bit of your own personality into the system and come up with something that not only can help soothe the irritations of a rough day but can actually be positively invigorating.

If you haven’t already, try changing your wallpaper. You can select from a standard assortment of wallpapers by right clicking an empty space on your Windows Desktop and then clicking on the Properties option in the pop-up menu that appears. When the Display Properties window appears, click on the Desktop tab. The current wallpaper configuration will be displayed. You can scroll through the list of wallpapers displayed in the Background: field. When you click on one, the monitor image in this window will show you what it would like on your screen. Depending on the size of the graphic and the Desktop configuration settings, this image may fill the whole screen or appear centered in a colored field. If the later, you can control the color of this field by clicking on the Color: button and selecting the desired color from the drop-down menu that appears. If you click on the Position: button, you can control whether the graphic is centered in the screen, potentially with this colored border, stretched to fill the screen, or tiled, meaning that windows displays multiple copies, or partial copies, of the image to fill the screen.

Depending on how your system was installed, the default wallpaper was likely ‘(None)’, giving a blank wallpaper with the color Blue or else ‘Bliss,’ with its rolling green hills. Whether these selections are to be politically correct and not offend anyone or were the installers idea of a perfect background I don’t know, but there are a number of other interesting options available. Depending on your mood, you might prefer the fiery leaves of ‘Autumn,’ the sunny beaches of ‘Azul,’ the more metaphysical ‘Stonehenge,’ or one of the other images that comes bundled with Windows. Note: The selection of pre-packaged wallpapers will vary to some extent with the version of Windows that you are using, but all versions allow you to customize the wallpaper displayed. Later versions of windows even allow you to install active wallpapers. While this could be done with earlier versions, you had to install extra software to do it. Some versions of MS Windows provide additional alternative ways of customizing the background on your display as well.

You are not restricted to using the wallpaper images that Microsoft provided. Note the Browse... button in the Display Properties window. This button opens a file Browse window, which allows you to browse your whole file system to locate a graphic of your own and load it. Once you select this graphic, you can then customize its display with the Position: and Color: buttons.

You actually don’t even have to open the Display Properties window to change your background. If you are navigating through your files using Windows Explorer and have a graphic file selected, just right click on it. This will open a pop-up menu and clicking on Set as Desktop Background will set your wallpaper to the selected image. A caveat to this is that the wallpaper will default to a Tiled display mode. If you want it set to Centered or Stretched, you’ll need to go into the Display Properties window to make those changes.

If you are looking for something a bit more adventurous, esoteric or even cutesy, the Web is here to cater to your every whim. Let’s start with a caution though. If you just fire up your favorite search engine and start hunting for ‘Free Wallpaper,’ you should be aware that this is one of the favorite search terms to lure users to mal-ware sites. Be very careful when searching for wallpaper and make sure you run it through a virus scanner BEFORE you try and load it! Just exploring sites at random for wallpaper is definitely not something you want to do without having all of your software patches up to date and your anti-virus software running. You might want to make sure that you have downgraded the security level of the Internet Zone to Medium or lower before proceeding with your quest as well.

Having said, you can also find a number of legitimate sites that specialize in providing wallpaper for your system. One that I’ve had particularly good luck using is called DesktopNexus. While their mission statement says that they “strive to build the world’s premier source for high-quality desktop backgrounds,” they are also an active user community, promoting active sharing between artists, photographers and those that are just appreciative of their work. This site even provides RSS feeds so that you can receive notification when a new wallpaper is uploaded in one of your favorite categories. As these wallpapers are simply graphic files, they can be used with any operating system and GUI that supports the customization of their wallpaper, including Linux and Apple’s OSX.

An examination of their Galleries list can be somewhat deceptive, with a somewhat generic sounding list ranging from Abstract through Architecture, Space, Technology and Video Games. However, once you start clicking on these Galleries, they expand into much more detailed listings. If you prefer running a Linux based GUI over Windows, they have an extensive list of wallpapers that illustrate your preference unmistakably! Do you like spacescapes? They have you covered, in depth. Prefer to throw in a little fantasy to balance the hard-core reality you have to deal with on a daily basis? They’ve got that covered as well, in just about any genre or viewpoint you can think of. While the site does have restrictions on the contents of the wallpapers posted, you still have to remember to use some judgment and discretion with which wallpaper you choose, as what is considered acceptable or offensive will vary from one organization to another, or even within groups in the same organization.

In addition to browsing through the site’s offerings, which can be enjoyable but quite a time sink, you can also search the site. Keep in mind though that while search terms can include the wallpaper title, file names, descriptions and tags, these items are defined by the wallpapers uploader; so, how useful they are in terms of narrowing the number of wallpapers returned varies enormously. In many cases you’ll find that no description has been entered at all. However, a useful feature of the search function is that for those items returned, a series of flags are also displayed indicating what types of data were matched. For example, flags indicating ‘Partial Title’, ‘Exact Title’, ‘Filename’, Description or ‘Partial Tag’ might be displayed. Having said that, I must also say that on comparing test search results, it is not clear to me what criteria it uses for some of these classifications, as I have been unable to determine why one image might show a flag of ‘Partial Title’ while another shows a flag of ‘Exact Title’, when the displayed titles appear to be the same.

Once you have identified a wallpaper you want to use, simply click on the Download Now! button. This will open a DesktopNexus window displaying your selected wallpaper. If you want to directly install this wallpaper on the computer your running on (in Windows), just right click on the image and click on the Set As Desktop Background... option in the pop-up menu that appears. If you want to install this wallpaper on another computer, or just want to save the image for backup purposes, click on the Save Image As... option instead. You can then name the file anything you want, though I recommend you make it as descriptive as possible, to make it easier to find in the future.

At the top of this window, you will also see three buttons and a status bar. The status bar displays the current screen resolution and aspect ratio. The Back to wallpaper button returns you to the various wallpaper description screens. The ? Instructions button simply tells you how to install the selected wallpaper on your system. Of more interest is the Options button. Clicking this button opens an Advanced Download Options window. By clicking on the screen resolutions displayed in this window you can override the auto-detected screen resolution. This can be quite useful if you need to download wallpaper for multi-monitor systems, particularly when one of the monitors is not currently connected to the system. It can also be very useful if you want to download wallpaper for several systems in a single session.

While you’re exploring the available wallpaper, you might as well take the opportunity to download a variety of options to match your various moods. Still, it is very easy to get so overwhelmed with work that you don’t feel you can spare the time to even switch your wallpaper. We’ll address that issue in future columns and examine some of the tools available to automatically swap your wallpaper. Till then, I encourage you to take a few minutes to update your computer’s wallpaper and make your cubicle a more welcoming place! Scientific Computing