LeeTutor's Doing Windows
Windows Tips Categories
Desktop Tips
USING BITMAP FILES FOR WALLPAPER
If you've had Windows 9x/ME at least a little while, I
imagine you have fooled around with Desktop Wallpaper.
You get to this screen by right-clicking on an empty
space on your desktop, choosing Properties from the
context menu, and now you have the Display Background
Properties sheet on your screen. You can choose either
Pattern or Wallpaper in order to have a graphical
background on your desktop. (Thus, if you choose to have
a pattern on your desktop, the Wallpaper item (None)
should be chosen simultaneously, and vice versa.) There
are lots of interesting graphical patterns and wallpaper
elements built in for you to choose from. But you can
also use any bitmap file (graphics files with a .BMP
extension) as large Wallpaper displays to completely
cover the background of your desktop.
For example, I once downloaded a Graphics Interchange
Format file called YODA.GIF, which shows a neat picture
of the character "Yoda" from one of the Star
Wars movies. I used one of my graphics converter programs
to create a YODA.BMP file, and then I used the
"Browse" button on the Wallpaper window in
order to find this file and point to it as my desired
wallpaper. Since it was a fairly sizeable graphic that I
wanted to cover the whole desktop, I clicked the Display
type as "Center", rather than "Tile".
(You would use "Tile" if you had a small
graphic which would be repeated across the screen to form
a pattern.)