Information Addicts

Firstly I would just like to say I hope you are all fit and well.
It has been 1 month since I last posted an article here, so what have I been up to?
I have been quite busy at work, and I have also been doing some volunteering work at my local birds of prey centre, which was amazing. I love all animals especially birds.
I have also decided to create another website, not 100% sure about what, but my interests are many and varied (hence the purpose of this site,) so I won’t have much trouble coming up with something to write about. There is also a very steep learning curve in designing and building your own websites, not a Wordpress one, which will take sometime to do. But I will let you know if and when I have one up and running.

If all goes well, I hope to go back to posting here every Wednesday, and if I have the time on Fridays. If you have anything you would like me to write about please let me know.

“A Picture is worth a thousand words,” so it is said, and in this article I am going to show you how to make your dull and boring windows folders, logon picture, and wallpaper much more interesting, inspirational, and elegant, because not only does it look really cool, but will also personalize them too. Best of all it only takes minutes to do each one.

How to add pictures to folders in Windows XP.
As you can see from the image below, adding pictures of your family, pets, or favourite animals etc can really make your folders stand out from the other monotonous ones.

Note: You cannot add pictures to top level C:/drive folders but everything else is ok.
1. Right click on any folder you would like to change and select Properties, click on the Customize tab at the top (if the Customize tab is missing then you cannot add a picture to that folder). Underneath ‘Folder pictures’ click on ‘Choose Picture’ which will open a Browse window.
2. Locate the picture that you want to add, and click on ‘Open’ at the bottom of the Browse window. Note: Your picture can be a .JPG, .PNG or even a .GIF file, and can even be any size it doesn’t matter, windows will automatically insert it onto the folder.
3. Click the OK button and voila your picture is displayed for all to see.

Add your own user account pictures.
If you don’t like the user account pictures that come with XP when you switch on your computer, you can easily add your own.
1. Choose your picture, it is best if the image is fairly square because windows will resize it to 48×48 pixels. The picture has to be a bitmap (.bmp extension) other wise it will not be displayed.
If your picture is in a different format, for example .jpg, it is very easy to convert. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Paint. Or Click Start > Run and in the Open field type mspaint.exe. Windows Paint program will open, click File > Open, locate your picture and select Open, and it will open in Paint. Then click File > Save As and choose 24-bit bitmap in the drop down ‘Save as type’ field at the bottom of the window, click on the Save button at the bottom, and make sure you remember where you saved the picture to.

So for example if your picture file was named family.jpg, you will now have created another picture file named family.bmp.

2. In order to drag your picture in to the correct windows folder you need to make sure the folder is unhidden, (as many windows folders are hidden by default) or you will not be able to see it. To check, double Click on My Computer and at the top menu click Tools > Folder Options, then click on the View tab, and under Advanced settings: click on the radio button, Show hidden files and folders. Click ok.

3. Now you need to click on My Computer, and go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\Default Pictures, and drag or copy and paste your picture here.

4. Click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts then click on your account and choose ‘Change my picture’, look for the image you added and select it, click the ‘Change Picture’ button and you’re all set!.

Now you have your very own personalized logon picture, much better than the duck or the football.
Enjoy!

Spice up your life, Spice up your Desktop wallpaper.
We tend to have the same old boring wallpaper on our computers, month after month, year after year. Yet there are some really beautiful and inspirational wallpapers on the internet, one website that I go back to time after time, for some very interesting and distinct wallpapers is SmashingMagazine. Take a look below at some of the wallpapers on this site.

All the screenshots you will see on this website are clickable and lead to the pages where they can be downloaded, however, some are much easier to download than others.

I hope this has been of interest to you.

What is your favorite desktop wallpaper, and which website do you download them from?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under PC Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.