After spending way too much time enjoying the gallery (who knew they were so gorgeous?) I picked an image and choose the 1024×768 image size from the download area.Īt this point I can simply right click on the image and choose “Set as Desktop Background” from the contextual pop-up menu.
Tons of amazing photos, all free for the download. To experiment with adding my own photograph, I’ve decided to pop over to the splendid NASA Image of the Day Gallery hosted by our friends at NASA. That’s what I want, so I’ll click on “Apply” and now have a cool lunar desktop. The preview looks like this:Ĭhange “Center” to “Stretch”, however, and now it looks like this: I’m going to choose “Radiance”, an amazing photo of the moon, and leave the default Position setting of “Center”. Even with photos, you’ll find that “stretch” is a good default setting. The tiny paintcan icon, however, denotes a full-size image that’s usually a photo.įor tiled images, note the options on the lower right for position and, if you don’t tile and have an image smaller than your desktop resolution, the background color to use. The paintbrush icon is a pattern that “tiles”, so it’s small and not a photograph. Tip: if you look closely at the list of background images, you’ll see that there are two different icons represented. The default, as you can see above, is “EeePC01” and it’s not very exciting, all in all. You can see a list of different pictures and patterns you can apply to your desktop here. The fastest way is to right-click on the Desktop itself, which pops up a menu:
The irony is that, just like on the Macintosh, it’s pretty darn easy to change your desktop picture on a Windows XP computer system.
If System contains a value named NoDispBackgroundPage, double-click this value and set it to 0.While the desktop picture is one of the most enjoyable things to change on your computer since you probably spend a lot of your time staring at it, it’s surprising to me that if you scan across a dozen computers in a café or airport, you’ll find that 30-50% of users never change the desktop from its default.Īdd the unusual screen dimensions of the ASUS EeePC screen (my 1000H, for example, operates at 1024×600 resolution) and it’s perhaps no surprise that people leave things alone rather than fiddle with them.If System contains a value named Wallpaper, select this value and then delete it.Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.If the above steps do not resolve the issue, here are some further things to try: Double-click the file and click Yes to the warning that changes will be made to the registry.Right-click fixwallpaper.reg and save it to your computer.This is a simpler way to perform the steps described above. These steps should restore the ability to change the desktop wallpaper in the majority of cases. Now expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies.If Policies contains a key named ActiveDesktop, select ActiveDesktop and delete it.Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies.Start the Registry Editor (click Start, Run and enter regedit.).
If the facility to change the desktop wallpaper is disabled in a home PC then this is usually the result of some malware that has changed the policy setting maliciously. This may have been set by the system administrator in the case of a company PC. The ability to change the background color or picture from a default setting can be disabled using a policy setting stored in the Windows Registry. If you right-click a picture and click "Set as Desktop Background", it has no effect. The Background list in Display Properties, Desktop is grayed out (disabled). You are unable to change the Windows desktop background (wallpaper).