Windows dressing: Customise your Desktop

Choose a new theme
The quickest and easiest way to give your Desktop a new lease of life is to select a new Desktop Theme. As explained earlier, a theme is a collection of appearance settings for the Desktop. This includes wallpaper, icons and even sounds.

Windows XP comes with a couple of preloaded themes as standard. If you want to give them a go now, open the Display Properties window (by right-clicking on the Desktop and selecting Properties) and select the Theme tab. You'll notice a drop-down selection box - this displays the current theme.

If the wallpaper or any other aspect of your Desktop has been changed, it will be labelled as Modified Theme. To save this theme, simply hit the Save As button and give this theme a name. You'll now be able to revert to this theme at any time in the future.

Take a look at the other themes available in the drop-down box. Select one and a preview will appear - if you like what you see, click on Apply or OK to confirm the choice (Apply will activate the new settings and allow you to continue making changes, OK simply makes the changes and closes the window).

Clicking on the 'More themes online ...' option accesses the Microsoft theme download website where additional themes can be downloaded free of charge.

Create your own wallpaper
The wallpapers included as standard with Windows XP are a good start, but to really personalise a PC, why not use one of your own photos as the wallpaper? There are two ways to do this. The quickest is simply to right-click on your image of choice when viewing it either on the internet or from within Windows Explorer. From the resulting list that appears, select the Set As Desktop Background option.

However, if you want to adjust how the image appears on the Desktop, it's best to go into the Desktop tab of the Display Options box (as explained earlier). Click on the Browse button and hunt down the photo you want to use. The Position setting controls whether the photo will appear tiled on the Desktop, stretched to fill the whole screen or centred on the screen. Try each option to see which looks best.

When using a photo as wallpaper, it's often best to select the Centre option, otherwise the photo may be distorted to fill the screen.

Select a new screensaver
Screensavers were originally designed to protect monitors from damage. Although modern monitors aren't as susceptible to image burn (where leaving a single image on the screen would start to permanently burn it in to the display), screensavers remain popular.

All screensaver settings can be found in the Screen Saver tab in Display Properties. The drop-down list displays all available screensavers - selecting one will instantly preview it on screen. You can specify when the screensaver will leap into action and, for added security, enable the password-protection option - this requires a password to be entered after the screensaver has been activated to get back to the Desktop.

Make sure you don't forget this password, otherwise the only way of resuming your Windows session will be to pull the power and reboot the PC, therefore losing any unsaved work.

Most screensavers can be customised further. Try clicking on the Settings button after selecting a screensaver. A list of options relevant to that screensaver will appear. In graphics-intensive screensavers, usually the quality settings can be reduced to cater for less powerful PCs. When happy with the choices, click on OK or Apply.

Design a personal screensaver
Although there are plenty of screensavers available on the internet, creating your own isn't that difficult with the help of Ultra Screensaver Maker.

Once Ultra Screensaver Maker has been downloaded, the first task is to name your screensaver. Next, add any images or photos you want to appear from the PC's hard disk. Audio files, such as MP3 or WAV tracks, can also be included and even movie or Flash media files.

Other settings include how long each image should appear on screen, applying effects between the different images and the order they should appear in. When you're done, save the new screensaver and activate it within the Screensaver section of the Display Properties window.