When somebody buys a computer or gets a job connected with computers, his first step is to create pleasant working atmosphere in his virtual space: he arranges the icons and chooses a background according to his taste.

Let’s talk about backgrounds, or desktop wallpapers as they are often called. It’s possible to say that there are three kinds of backgrounds: a plain background or an image or a web-page. These kinds are set in the Display Properties window:

To open that window you should right-click on the desktop and choose Properties menu item, or use Display Icon from the Control Panel. Also there is the Background page in the Screen Calendar program where you can set these and other parameters which aren’t available through the Windows® standard settings.

Plain Background

Usually plain backgrounds are less attractive than images, nevertheless many people use them. It can be because of the computer limitations (for instance, 'weak' videocard can’t show a full-color image correctly) or, maybe, some people don’t like any motley backgrounds. The background can be of any color.

Even if the background is an image the background color is necessary for icons’ titles on the desktop. The color of icons’ texts also depends on the background color. Windows chooses the color of icons’ texts either black or white automatically. This doesn't concern Windows XP because its icon background is transparent.

There is an easy way to choose a background color with the help of the Eyedropper Tool in the Screen Calendar software. Down mouse button on Eyedropper and move the mouse across the screen to choose precise color.

Image

This is a frequently used kind of background. It allows to create really pleasant atmosphere whether it is a scenery or a marine or a lovely girl’s shot or cars or an abstract picture etc. There are a lot of web-sites with free pictures for wallpapers. You can find them at the best search engine Google.

Windows supports three image position of desktop: center, tile and stretch. The image size must fit the screen resolution (for example, 800x600 or 1024x768 etc.), but often it isn’t so. What’s up then? The center position adds some blank space for a small image and crops a big image. The Tile places a small images many times both vertically and horizontally. The Stretch resizes a source image to the screen size.

In the Screen Calendar there is a feature allowing to resize a source image keeping original proportions (if you don’t save proportions the image will be distorted). Moreover, Screen Calendar can do anti-aliasing while the most of Windows's version can’t do that. Screen Calendar allows to place the image not only in the center but in any place of the desktop, it can be in the top left corner, in the bottom center part, or wherever else.

The native raster format of Windows is BitMap(BMP). The other frequently-used format in the web is JPEG, but it requires Active Desktop installing. Unfortunately, Win95 and WinNT don’t support Active Desktop. Screen Calendar permits to use JPEG images without Active Desktop.

To change the image, it should be chosen from a background list or selected after clicking the Browse button. If the image is at the web-site and you see it in the window of Internet Explorer you can set that image as background in the following way: right-click the image and choose the appropriate menu item.

Moreover, Screen Calendar can change images automatically if the image list is pre-formed or the folder, where images could be got from, is specified. The period of automatic change can be set from 5 minutes to 12 hours.

Web page

Since the Active Desktop feature has appeared, it is possible to use web pages as wallpaper. Either the home page or favorite news site or any web-document can be shown on your desktop, so the whole desktop becomes the explorer which allows surfing the Internet.

As Active Desktop uses Internet Explorer, it influences on the computer productivity negatively because Active Desktop consumes much system resources. Its usage isn’t recommended for low-productive computers. As it was said before, not all versions of Windows® support Active Desktop.

In Windows XP the incorrect showing of icons is noted if web pages are used as background (with no edge anti-aliasing).

Beginning with the version 4.0, Screen Calendar doesn't use Active Desktop, and this has accelerated loading and working speed of the computer.

Also see the "How and where can I get calendar wallpapers?" article