Desktop and Window Appearance in Vista

As subtle as the desktop and window appearance may originally seem, it can have an impact on your attitude and thought process while working hour upon hour on ur trusty puter.

Here are some basics for accessing Vista's desktop and window appearance options:

• Minimize all your windows by holding down the windows key on your keyboard and the letter M at the same time, or else, using the show desktop icon on your taskbar.
• Right-click on any portion of your desktop that doesn't have icons and select Personalize from the menu.
• Select either Window Color and Appearance or Desktop Background.

For Window Color and Appearance:

• Select one of the already existing 8 colors, or click on the Show Color Mixer option to play around and create your own
• Select the color intensity to focus more on the color and less on the transparency, or vice versa
• Click ok

For Desktop Background:

• The first portion of the window entails the selection of the graphic you will use for your desktop background
• The drop-down menu will provide you a number of locations from which you can pull the graphic. Windows wallpapers has some excellent options, or you can use your own BMP or JPG file
• The second portion of the window entails the selection of size and appearance of the graphic you're using for your background
• Select whether you want the image to fit the screen, be tiled, or be centered (letterbox style sometimes depending on your screen size).
• Click ok

An alternative way to quickly save a file as your desktop background, is to surf online for great images, such as by using images.google.com (show options/large) and save them as your desktop.

• When you find an image to your liking, right click on it and select "set as desktop background"
  
• Some webmasters turn this option off when the image is copyright protected
  
• Some images won't have the desktop background option so you'll have to save them onto your puter: right click and save as
  
• I prefer to convert all desktop images to bmp using Microsoft Office Picture Manager/Export/BMP... cause I'm old skool like that ;)