Who's Looking Back At You?
By Gary Woods

One of the ways you can customize your computing experience is by making your screen saver unique. Windows XP has a way that you can take your photos and display them as a slide show.

Start by putting the photos you want to display into you're My Pictures folder into a sub-directory you create called Screen Saver. You can create this sub-directory by clicking on Start and then on My Pictures. Then, right mouse click in the pane on the right and click on New and select Folder. Name the folder Screen Saver. Once you've created the sub-directory you can just drag and drop the pictures you'd like to use into the folder.

Next, right mouse click anywhere on your desktop and click on Properties and then on the Screen Saver tab. From the list in the drop-down menu, select My Pictures Slideshow.

Now click on the Settings button. Go down to the tab labeled "Browse" and navigate around to C:\Documents and Settings\(Your Name)\My Documents\My Pictures\Screen Saver. Once you have the right folder selected you can control how often the pictures in the slide show change and the size of the pictures as they open on your screen.

You have the option to stretch small pictures, allow scrolling through pictures with the keyboard, and show the names of the pictures in the screen saver slide show. You can also use transition effects between pictures. Is that cool or what???

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910