Yahoo! Hacks

Randomize Your Windows Desktop Background

Use the Yahoo! Image Search web service to spin a virtual roulette wheel and let fate choose your desktop background image.

People love to change their desktop backgrounds. It’s one of the first skills that new computer users learn, and even old computer pros fiddle with their desktop background image on a fairly regular basis. Browsing through the aisles of your local computer shop, you’ll find CDs full of scenic imagery that you can use as your desktop background pictures. But why shell out money for custom backgrounds, when you can use the entire Web as your source for background images?

The Yahoo! Image Search is a good place to start your search for a new desktop background. Point your browser to http://search.yahoo.com/images and type in a query, such as landscape. You should find many thumbnails of images, such as the ones in Figure 5-15, which would make suitable desktop backgrounds.

Figure 5-15. Yahoo! Image Search results for “landscape”

Underneath each photo is the name of the image file, its size in pixels, and the URL where the image was found. The closer the image is to the size of your current desktop, the better it will look as a background. To find out your desktop’s current resolution, right-click anywhere on your desktop, choose Properties from the menu, and click the Settings tab. The current size of your desktop is listed ...