A while ago, I was talking to my father and he said, "I have your picture sitting on my computer screen." After inquiring, it turned out that he’d taken a picture from our web site and used it as his computer "wallpaper." For those like me who generally stare at plain old desktops, wallpaper is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a picture that you use as desktop background.
In my father’s case, he apparently dug deep into our web site and found our dog photos (at http://www.logicalexpressions.com/hound.htm, if you’re curious). If you are using an online image, you can just right-click and choose Set as Wallpaper (Windows 98) or Set Background (in XP). The image appears larger than life on your desktop. Sometimes it appears too large. In fact, when I tried this with the picture my father used, I found it really disturbing because the aspect ratio was way off.
The aspect ratio is basically just the ratio of the height to the width of an image. The image on our site is square and the Windows desktop is rectangular. To compensate, Windows stretched the image horizontally to take up the entire screen. Let’s just say it was NOT attractive.
By default, Windows tries to stretch the image to make it fit, but you can change this setting. Right-click on the Desktop and choose Properties. In Windows 98, you select the Background tab. (In Windows XP, the tab is called Desktop.) Either way, in the Position drop-down, you can choose to tile or center the image instead of stretching it.
If you want to use your picture for other purposes as well as wallpaper, you can save it to your hard disk as a file. In this case, after you find your image on a Web site, right click and choose Save As instead of the Set as Wallpaper command. In the Save Picture As dialog box, save the picture to a folder on your computer’s hard disk (and be sure to pay attention to where you save it).
Now right-click anywhere on your Windows desktop and choose Properties. In the Background (or Desktop in XP) tab, click the Browse button to find the image you saved on your hard disk.
Once you have located the image, click Open to add it into the list of backgrounds. Click to select your image and click Apply to see what it looks like.