It’s your desktop. Do with it what you will. I’ve never bumped into a complete description of how the Windows desktop gets tossed together, so you Dummies go to the head of the class. You may think it’d be easy for a computer to slap windows on the screen, but it isn’t. In fact, Windows XP uses seven separate layers to produce that Windows eXPerience and you can take control of every piece. I show you how in this article. I’ve also included a discussion of Desktop Themes, backgrounds in Windows Explorer, and custom pictures for folders. Pretty cool stuff, especially when you see CD album covers plastered on My Music folders. Recognizing Desktop Levels The Windows XP desktop that is, the stuff you see on your computer screen consists of seven layers.

For a quick change of pace, Desktop Themes change all seven layers, all at once. I talk about Desktop Themes later in this article in “Using Desktop Themes.” Here are the seven settings that control how Windows dishes up your desktop:  -  At the very bottom, the Windows desktop has a base color, which is a solid color that you see only if you don’t have a background or if your chosen background doesn’t fill up the entire screen. Most people never see their Windows base color because the background usually covers it up. I tell you how to set the base color and all of the other Windows colors for dialog boxes, the Taskbar, the works in the section, “Setting Colors in Windows XP.”  

-  Above the base color lives the Windows background. You may be familiar with the rolling hills background the one Microsoft calls Bliss because it’s the one that ships with Windows XP. The people who sold you your computer may have ditched Microsoft’s Bliss background and replaced it with some sort of dorky ad or logo. I tell you how to get rid of the ad and replace it with a picture you want in the section called “Picking a Background.”

 -  On top of the background, Windows lets you put pictures, Web pages, and just about anything you can imagine. Microsoft even has a little stock ticker and weather map that you can download and stick in this layer. This is the so-called Active Desktop layer and, by and large, it’s a disaster.  

-  Windows puts all of its desktop icons on top of the Active Desktop layer. Bone-stock Windows XP includes only one icon the Recycle Bin. If you bought a PC with Windows XP preinstalled, chances are good that the manufacturer put lots of additional icons on the desktop, and you can easily get rid of them. I tell you how in the section, “Controlling Icons.”  

-  Above the icons you (finally!) find the program windows the ones that actually do work. You know, little things like Word, Excel, and the Media Player.

 -  Then you have the mouse, which lives in the layer above the program windows. If you want to change the picture used for the pointer, I talk about fancy mouse pointers in the section, “Changing Mouse Pointers.”

 -  At the very top of the desktop food chain sits the screen saver. The screen saver kicks in only if you tell Windows that you want it to appear when your computer sits idle for a spell. I talk about that beast in the section called “Selecting Screen Savers.” If you have more than one user on your PC, each user can customize every single part of the seven layers to suit his or her tastes, and Windows XP remembers every setting, bringing it back when the user logs on. Much better than getting a life, isn’t it? Setting Colors in Windows XP Windows XP ships with three designer color schemes: Blue (which you probably use), Olive Green (which looks just as bad as you might imagine) and silver (rather, uh, self-consciously techno-blah). To change color schemes:

1. Right-click on any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose Properties. The Display Properties dialog box appears.

2. Click the Appearance tab

3. From the Color Scheme drop-down list, choose Default (blue), Olive Green, or Silver, and click OK.

Windows changes the base color that is, the color of the Windows desktop when no background appears or the background doesn’t fit (see the section, “Picking a Background”) as well as the title bar color of all windows and dialog boxes, the color of the Windows Taskbar, menu highlight colors, and a dozen other colors, scattered in various places throughout Windows. You aren’t confined to Microsoft’s three-color world. In fact, you can pick and choose many different Windows colors, individually, although some of them appear on-screen only if you tell Windows to use the Windows Classic Style of windows and buttons the old-fashioned pre-XP style, where windows had squared off edges and OK buttons weren’t so boldly sculpted. To set the desktop’s base color to white regardless of whether you use Windows XP Style or Windows Classic Style windows and buttons follow these steps:

1. Right-click on any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose Properties. The Display Properties dialog box appears.

2. Click the Appearance tab.

3. Click Advanced.

4. Make sure that Desktop appears in the Item drop-down list; then click the down-arrow under Color 1 and click on the white color swatch in the upper-left corner.

5. Click OK twice. Your desktop base color is now set to white, although you may have to change (or get rid of) your background in order to see it. I talk about strangling and axing the background in the next section. Stand back, Lizzie Borden.

Picking a Background

Windows XP, straight out of the box, ships with a picture of rolling verdant hills as the background. This background is peaceful and serene Microsoft calls it “Bliss” and it’s booooooooring. If you bought a PC with Windows XP preinstalled, chances are very good that the manufacturer has replaced Bliss with a background of its own choosing maybe the manufacturer’s own logo or something a bit more subtle, like “Buy Wheaties.” Don’t laugh. The background is up for sale. PC manufacturers can include whatever they like. There’s nothing particularly magical about the background. In fact, Windows XP will put any picture on your desktop big one, little one, ugly one, even a picture stolen straight off the Web. Here’s how:

1. Right-click on any empty part of the Windows desktop and choose Properties. The Display Properties dialog box appears.

2. Click the Desktop tab In the Background box, Windows XP lists pictures from the Windows folder and the My Pictures folder. (It also lists Web pages files with HTM or HTML as filename extensions in both of those folders.) Windows ships with lots of pictures in the Windows folder.

3. Scroll through the Background box and pick the picture you want. If you don’t see the picture you’re looking for surprisingly, pictures in the Shared Pictures folder aren’t included in this list, for example click the Browse button and go find the picture. A preview of the picture appears in the little monitor screen on the dialog box.

4. If your picture is too big to fit on the screen, you need to tell Windows how to shoehorn it into the available location. If your picture is too small to cover up the entire screen, you need to tell Windows what to do with the extra room. You do both in the Position drop-down list. Selecting None for a background means that you don’t want Windows XP to use a background at all: It should let the base color show through, unsullied.

5. If you tell Windows to put your too-small picture in the Center of the screen in the Position box, you can use the Color box as a quick way to set the base color.

6. Click Apply. Windows changes the background according to your specifications but leaves the Display Properties dialog box open so that you can change your mind.

7. Click OK. The Display Properties dialog box disappears. Many people are mystified by the Color box on the Display Properties dialog box because it doesn’t seem to do anything. In fact, Color kicks in only when you choose Center for the Position and when the picture you’ve chosen as a background is too small to occupy the entire screen. Changing the base color in the Advanced Appearance dialog box also changes the color on the Desktop tab and vice versa. Windows XP lets you right-click on a picture a JPG or GIF file, regardless of whether you’re using Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer and choose Use as Desktop Background. When you do that, the picture appears as the background, with Position set to Stretch (if the picture is too big for the screen) or Tile (if the picture is not too big for the screen).