It used to be darn near impossible to create a personal screen saver using your own photo collection. To do this, you had to track down a third-party application and sloppily piece together your pictures to create a screen saver. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and choose Properties.
Well, the engineers at Microsoft must have realized they hated third-party applications and decided enough was enough. XP can take any pictures stored in your "My Pictures" folder and display them in random order as a screen saver.
To make a personal screen saver in XP, follow these directions:
Click the Screen Saver tab inside the Display Properties dialog box.
In the Screen Saver pull-down menu, choose "My Pictures Slideshow."
Underneath the Screen Saver pull-down menu, adjust the time of inactivity before Windows will initiate your screen saver.
Click Settings to make additional adjustments. You'll be able to adjust transition effects between pictures, how frequently they change, what size the pictures should be, and more.
Click OK when you're done tweaking the settings adjustments.
Press the Preview button to see what your screen saver looks like.
If everything is to your liking, click Apply.
It's shockingly easy to create your own icons in Windows XP. Open MS Paint. On the Image menu, click Attributes. Type 32 for both the Width and Height of the document, and Select the Pixels under Unit. Click OK to create a new 32x32-pixel document: the size of an icon.
Now create your image of the icon and save it with the extenion .ico. (The extension ".ico" tells Windows that it's an icon file.) You just created an icon! Now you can change any shortcut or folder to your own icon—just browse to it on your hard drive.
You can display any two windows side by side on the desktop by first clicking a window's button on the Taskbar. Next, press and hold the Ctrl key and right-click the second window that you want to open, then click Tile Vertically or Tile Horizontally. This works great when you want to view two Microsoft Word or Microsoft Internet Explorer windows at the same time.
The really cool thing about the Links toolbar is that it's completely customizable. Try this: Navigate to your favorite application and drag and drop its icon to the Links toolbar. You just created a shortcut. Do this again and again for as many applications as you want to appear on the toolbar.
To view a window full screen, Open the window which you want to see in full screen, then press the F11 key at the top of your keyboard—to get the biggest window possible.
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