Ivan wrote me a while back and asked, “I change screen backgrounds often. What happens to the one that’s replaced?”  His question is a good one and it made me match it up with questions from several other readers.

You may change your desktop wallpaper many different ways but I suggest an easy way.  Open the folder that your picture is in, view or open the picture, then right click on it, next choose “Set as Desktop Wallpaper”, “Set as Desktop Background” or whatever slogan your system has that means the same thing.  The choice varies between operating systems.  After a few seconds of waiting your desktop wallpaper will now be the picture you chose.

From this point you can adjust the graphic by going to the desktop and right clicking anywhere it is empty.  In Windows Vista choose “Personalize/Desktop Background” and play with the settings.  For XP, use the same right click but then choose “Properties/Desktop” and adjust from there.

For Ivan, if you change the desktop wallpaper picture nothing will happen to it.  It remains located where it was and the new picture becomes the wallpaper.  Unless (don’t you hate the exceptions?) you have gotten the wallpaper from a picture on the internet.  Let’s say you were browsing my website and saw a picture of me.  You really wanted me to be your wallpaper so you right clicked on my face and chose it to be the new wallpaper.  A generic filename is created for that picture (which you don’t see unless you go searching).  If you change that background again, using the same procedure the new picture will be named the same filename and the first picture will be overwritten and lost.

Now I will respond to some other writers who want to know if there is a way to change wallpapers automatically.  Windows 7, supposedly arriving late this summer has this feature called, “Wallpaper Slideshow“.  This feature could change or disappear by the time “W7″ hits the market. 

Until then there are many free applications that allow you to automatically change wallpapers at an interval of your choosing.  I have used “Auto Wallpaper Changer 1.1″ (Google to find it) successfully for quite some time.  Note that it doesn’t work very well on Vista systems.  For Vista, “WallPaper Changer” (wallpaperchanger.de) is suggested which also seems to work well although I haven’t used it that often.

Try them out and let me know if you like them.  As always, you are responsible for any installations on your computer.  If I mention it that means that they have worked well for me without any problems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 5:47 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.