Customize your Windows Desktop Background

To many of people, the idea of customizing their Windows desktop isn't even something they even think about doing. Either people don't put as much thought into personlizing (basically it's not something they care about) or they haven't gotten that far in their computer education. Well if you're the latter, I say that there's something new to be learned here and so lets talk about the most basic of Windows desktop customization in the form of changing the desktop background.
 
For about the longest time, the background on my work computer had been fairly dull--the default Windows XP background of a green grassy field and a blue sky with clouds in it. I tired of looking at it and wanted to look at something else on my desktop, but I'm not one to put a whole lot of thinking power into it; there are better ways to waste energy.
 
After doing a google search for "windows wallpaper" and "desktop background", I was given a slew of search results. Apparently there is no shortage of websites out there that have "free wallpapers" for you to download. Of course some caution should be taken here as nothing is ever really truely free. But if you look carefully and hard enough, you will always be able to find free software on the internet with no strings attatched. Alot of the so called "free" software and websites you come accross on the internet are potential spyware and virus threats and so that's why I say that you should always be careful on the internet in general. Here at Excel Computers, we have reinstalled many a customer's Windows that were corrupted/damaged beyond repair by inadvertant virus/spyware infections related to normal web browsing by our customers.
 
Getting back on topic: The two websites I found for desktop backgrounds that I liked are HDwallpapers.net  and Desktop Nexus. On either of those two websites, you'll be able to find a large selection of desktop backgrounds or wallpapers sorted by type. HDwallpapers has you download the wallpaper you want in a zip file. Once you download it, you'll have to extract the wallpaper picture file out of the zip archive. I recommend saving it to your either your "My Documents" folder or the "My Pictures" folder with "My Document". After which you can open up the folder where you saved your wallpaper picture file to with windows explorer, highlight the file, right click your mouse and select "Set as Desktop Background". Desktop Nexus makes it a little easier with having a "Download" button on the page of the wallpaper you select. Once you press it, your taken to a page where you see the wallpaper picture enlarged. There you can right click on the picture and select "Set as Desktop Background". So after doing so, your desktop background or wallpaper will be set to a different picture. You essentially do the same in Windows Vista as there is a "Set as Desktop Background" option in the menu when right clicking on an image file.