Cause Windows XP has a cool feature that allows you to easily create a screen saver from your digital pictures. This is a great way to have your family members, cat, dog, or whatever on your screen saver. My Pictures is easy to use—just access the Screen Saver tab of Display Properties and choose the My Pictures Slideshow from the drop-down menu. Windows XP will look in your My Pictures folder (found in the My Documents folder) for pictures to use, so you should put any pictures you want displayed there. After that, you can use the Settings button to configure how the pictures should be displayed.
The Pain Killer To make the My Pictures Slideshow work the way you want, follow these steps:
- Click Start | Control Panel.
- Double-click Display, and then click the Screen Saver tab.
- On the Screen Saver tab, make sure the My Pictures Slideshow is selected in the drop-down menu and make sure you have the pictures you want to use in the My Pictures folder.
- Click the Settings button on the Screen Saver tab. This opens the My Pictures Screen Saver Options window, shown in the illustration. Make any adjustments in this window as needed. You can change how often pictures should be displayed and how they should appear in the screen. You can also choose to use different transitions between pictures, which is sort of cool. When you select a transition, the effect is used to change pictures. Common examples are blend, slide left/right, cover, and so forth. Once you are done, click OK and test your screen saver again.
Did you notice the Use Pictures in This Folder option in the illustration? While it is true that the My Pictures screen saver looks for pics in the My Pictures folder, you can change that behavior here and choose a different folder. This allows you to tell the screen saver to get pictures from any folder on your hard drive, which might be a lot easier if you have pictures stored in another location or even in several different folders.
