wallpapers

Looking at the same desktop background every day gets boring. Sure, you can wade through your digital photos, or hunt down the perfect image online, but that image will just suffer the same fate. Perhaps you've been building a collection of great backgrounds for years, but you're still manually selecting a picture every other day. This is where Auto-wallpapers comes in. Its straight-forward--if slightly cluttered--interface will allow you to easily gather up all your special pictures and automatically switch between them at just about any interval between every 72 hours to every second.

Mostly, the features are all … Read more

This desktop customization tool places a virtual art gallery at your fingertips. You could spend hours going through the Desktoptopia's amazing graphics and photos.

Activating Desktoptopia is simply a matter of clicking on the desktop icon. Doing so introduces a taskbar icon for managing the wallpaper gallery. A right-click displays your menu options, including the preferences. There, you can manage the wallpaper rotations, including how often you want to change the wallpaper design. You can also manage your wallpaper feed categories. Forward and backward commands let you navigate the hundreds of designs. All of the designs looked extremely professional; … Read more

Add a little spirituality to your desktop with this free customization tool, though some might find the designs a little too busy for the eyes.

DesktopLive offers several different wallpaper designs; each with a biblically-inspired quote. The wallpaper can be changed by right-clicking the Next wallpaper option from the taskbar shortcut, but be prepared to wait a few seconds for it to change. We clicked through each of the wallpaper designs, and found them a little too busy for our tastes, and we had a hard time reading our desktop icons on top of the design. There's an option … Read more

If you're glued to your computer, you should make it as inspiring as you can.

That was our goal back in September 2006 when we first put together a collection of top desktop enhancement apps.

Since then, Microsoft's spiced-up graphics have added a charm to Vista that XP out-and-out lacked, but is the blue look you, or can you still do better? We've picked out the best free and free-to-try downloads to give you a brightly colored taskbar, animated wallpaper, and dynamic cursor options for your XP or Vista box. Check out the desktop eye candy in … Read more

Putting the clumsier applications of animated wallpaper to shame, DeskScapes wields Windows Vista's 3D hardware acceleration to result in crisp, buoyant, sometimes photorealistic animated wallpaper in the .Dream format.

Dynamic wallpaper this nice is a visual extravagance, but one with a catch. You're welcome to use the three bundled deskscapes without charge for as long as you'd like. But the swaying grass and rippling water will pull you to the online gallery of publisher- and user-made motifs you can download for free or for a premium. This is where the app gets you--you can install all the … Read more

Advanced Desktop Shield installs an icon in the system tray that lets you access a nicely designed and easy-to-use interface. In our tests, saving a managing desktop layout was simple, and we mastered the process in less than two minutes, thanks to the clearly defined buttons and layout of the interface.

This application performed quickly in all our tests, and it restored changed desktop layouts quickly and without fail after multiple boots and restarts, even when we changed the wallpaper. If your PC has multiple users, this application offers a great method for each to have a customized desktop layout … Read more

This wallpaper and screensaver hybrid gets points for ingenuity and points for effect as photorealistic snowfall dots your desktop. You'll find SnowFall Living Desktop listed in the screensaver tab of your display menu. Yet you tweak the settings from the icon that's active in your task tray. Select from of of eleven frosty backgrounds, then adjust wind speed to create a light snowfall or blustery conditions. Then, sit back and enjoy the powder drifting onto your desktop.

Not long ago, CNET Editor Brian Tong gave an instructive Insiders Secret video on creating your own iPhone ringtones using only iTunes 8. Although he only used one program as promised, there was quite a bit of cobbling involved to turn that song into a phone tune. Truth is, I'm a little lazier than that. I'm looking for one application to make me a decent-sounding ringtone I can get on my phone with the least amount of hassle possible.

ToneThis is a good fit for this endeavor. I've reviewed this freeware application in the past--it was the … Read more

ToneThis hails from the school of personalized cell phone content that errs on the side of simplicity. Not everyone wants or needs dozens of settings to produce a functional ringtone or wallpaper photo, and to that end, ToneThis is the perfect entree for casual customizers.

It's got a few basic enhancements for editing ringtone length and adding fades, but it could stand to gain a few more. Even novice users might like to reduce red-eye in a favorite photo. Still, for many, ToneThis will be the hassle-free vehicle of choice for getting their videos, music, and photos onto their … Read more