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Hello, everyone. This is Jeremy from BeYourOwnIT.com. We’re going to change it up a little bit and do a couple of extra videos this week. Today is Sunday. I’ve got a little extra time, and I’d like to beef up the site with some additional videos. So, what I wanted to do is do a bunch of videos today on a couple features of Windows, and a way to get around Windows, and do things like that.

Today what I’m going to focus on is the display settings ‑‑ how to change your background, how to change your screensaver, how to change your resolution, and all these things. Again, to plug the site, it’s BeYourOwnIT.com, where we offer free tech support ‑‑ including a new feature, tech support chat, tech support forum, articles, product reviews, and a blog. Check us out, sign up, you guys can comment on our blog and comment on our stories. Your feedback is definitely welcome.

Let’s start out today by getting into the Display Settings. The quickest way to access it is to right click on an open space in your desktop. This is true for Windows 98 and most Windows operating systems. Go into “Properties”. Let’s start with the settings.

Here you can change the screen resolution. LCD monitors, they look a lot better with a higher resolution. The best way to look at this is: as you go up in resolution, things will get smaller, yet a lot more refined. I can’t show you because I’m doing a screen capture and it will get all messed up, but it will appear to zoom out. It gives you a bigger desktop to work with. I personally like having a high resolution so I can have many things going on at my screen at once.

Typically, this is limited by your video card’s capabilities. But if you set it, and it doesn’t work, it’s no big deal. You can try out a couple to see which you like the best.

Color quality ‑‑ XP standard is 32‑bit. Again, that’s along with your video card. Some older computers may be limited in this aspect. But try a couple of different resolutions ‑‑ see what you like best. I prefer higher resolutions; maybe you prefer lower resolutions. Feel free to comment; let me know what your favorite resolution is and why you like it.

The other topic I want to talk about is screensaver. Most of you probably know how to do this. In selecting your screensaver, just go to the Screensaver Tab, and you can choose from any of these.

I have the Windows default one, of course. You can choose any one you like. And if you have 3D text, say something like this, you can even go to the settings, and have it say whatever you want and mess with it, go through different options and all sorts of different things that you may like. You can even do a preview. I don’t know if this is going to pick it up or not, but, anyway, you can preview it, and try all sorts of different stuff.

Here’s how you can set how many minutes. If you’ve been idle for four minutes, five minutes, whatever, you want to change it to an hour, you can do all that here.

Now for your desktop, you’ll notice I have the standard Windows background. Here’s where you can go through all of the Windows ones, all the various ones that they have, change it to something like this. Maybe I like this better. I don’t know.

Typically, you want to do the “stretch” over the “center” or “tile”, especially if you’re using your own picture. If you have your own custom picture, all you’ll need to do is use this “Browse” button here. Click on it. Find your picture, wherever it is ‑‑ if it’s on your desktop, or wherever it may be ‑‑ and then just select it, and hit “Apply”. It will change your background. Really easy.

Themes ‑‑ I don’t mess much with this. If you guys like to do custom themes, maybe I could do a video on that for you, but to me, the general Windows one is perfectly fine.

So again, desktop. Here’s where you can change your background picture. You can go through a little more features and you can do customized desktop, where you can change icons and all that kind of stuff. For the most part, just changing your background picture is enough here.

For screensaver, you can obviously go through all these standard ones and mess with them a little bit. For appearance ‑‑ I didn’t go through this before ‑‑ but if you look here, notice how it looks now. I can go to the “classic”, the old Windows way. This changes what’s called the GUI or the graphical user interface. You can change your color scheme. Say I want it olive green, maybe that’s a little easier on my eyes. Whatever the case may be, you can change all these things.

For settings, again, where you can change your monitor resolution and your color. If you want to go into “Advanced”, you can see a few more options about your video card and your monitor, but most people I’d probably recommend that there’s really nothing in there to mess around with.

Again, if you want to customize how you see things ‑‑ the way your screen looks, the resolution ‑‑ Display Properties is the way to go.

I want to show you another way to get to the Display Properties, by going to Start, Control Panel, and then Display. Same thing, as you can see the same menu.

Again, remember ‑‑ I’ll just bring up our website here, so you can see what it looks like. Remember to BeYourOwnIT.com. Join our blog, and get your comments out there. Remember, we take suggestions on videos, so you can email us at support@beyourownit.com. We’d love to hear from you, and we’d love to see you on our site.