2. Choosing Your Desktop Background
The Windows desktop can display a solid background color
or a picture as Windows wallpaper. Windows 7 provides a fairly large set of
ready-to-use background images that you can use as wallpaper.
On your computer’s hard drive, these default background images are
stored in subfolders of the %WinDir%\Web\Wallpaper folder. The name of
each subfolder sets the name of a category that appears when you are
working with Windows desktop backgrounds.
You can create background images to use as Windows wallpaper as
well. You must create these background images as .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .dib, or .png files. If you add images in these
formats to name subfolders of the %WinDir%\Web\Wallpaper folder, the images
will be available as part of the Windows wallpaper and organized into
the named sets according to the subfolder names. If you do not have
access to that folder, or if you would prefer to not make changes to
that folder, you can also use pictures from your Pictures Library or
specify a folder elsewhere.
The key thing you
need to know in terms of adding new wallpaper or even using your own
images from a different location is that you should optimize every background image you use. If you don’t do
this, you risk affecting your computer’s performance.
In case you’re wondering why this may be so, let me tell you the
cautionary tale of an experienced pro (me) who added a picture of his
kids to the desktop background and suddenly found his computer’s
performance was moderately degraded. My digital camera takes
high-resolution pictures—most do these days—and its pictures are about 4
MB in size, on average. By adding an unedited picture to the desktop
background, I was forcing the operating system to swap in 4 MB of extra
data every time the operating system displayed the desktop.
Now you may be thinking, “4 MB is no big deal; my computer has
gigabytes of RAM.” Well, the problem wasn’t system memory (RAM) but
graphics memory. Most computers use both dedicated and
shared graphics memory. The dedicated memory on most computer video
cards is relatively meager, in contrast to shared memory, which is part
of RAM, so swapping in and out 4 MB is a big deal. Also, the image was
sized at 3,072 × 2,304 pixels when the screen size I was using was 1,920
× 1,200 pixels. This means that not only did the graphics card have to
manage this large picture, but also Windows 7 had to resize the image to
fit on the screen.
The solution to the problem was fairly simple: I opened the image
in my photo editor, resized it to 1,920 × 1,200 pixels, and saved the
resized image with a new name to the Pictures folder in my profile. The resized
image was 1 MB, and my computer was much happier.
If you examine the default images Windows 7 uses for wallpaper,
you’ll find that most are less than 2 MB in size. In fact, the
Landscapes images, some of the most visually stunning wallpaper images,
are the most highly optimized. You’ll find that they are available at a
standard screen ratio of 1,920 × 1,200.
You can set the background for the desktop by completing the
following steps:
Right-click an open area of the desktop and then select
Personalize.
On the Personalization page in the Control Panel, click
Desktop Background. This displays the Desktop Background page, as
shown in Figure 2.
Use the Picture Location pull-down menu to specify where to
look for the picture you want to use, or click Browse to select a
location. The default locations are as follows:
- Windows Desktop Backgrounds
Displays the wallpaper images in the %WinDir%\Web\Wallpaper
folder.
- Pictures Library
Displays the images in your Pictures library, which is a
combination of your My
Pictures folder and the Public Pictures folder by
default.
- Top Rated Photos
Displays the top-rated pictures in your Pictures library.
- Solid Colors
Allows you to choose from more than 50 background
colors, or create your own background color by clicking More
and then using the Color dialog box to select or mix your
color.
