Saturday, June 16, 2007

Widescreen wallpaper craze

My obsession in the past few days has been looking for and downloading widescreen wallpapers from the Internet. What prompted this sudden craze is the purchase of a new Dell Inspiron 640m laptop which my sister and I bought primarily for our mom to use. (I already have my own Inspiron 600m--yep, this one I'm using right now--but I often have to bring it with me to work leaving my mom with nothing to use here at home.) As is the case for most new PCs and laptops being sold nowadays, it has been preloaded with Windows Vista (Home Basic) and this particular model has a 14" widescreen monitor which is ideal for 1440x900 desktop wallpapers. Of course, a few wallpapers (widescreen 16:10 and the usual 4:3) are included but as usual I wasn't satisfied with the choices available and looked to the Internet for more. Happily for me, I came across a number of good sources.

My primary source for high-resolution wallpapers I have downloaded so far is the cleverly named website called InterfaceLIFT where people upload not only wallpapers but icons and desktop themes as well. Wallpapers available there cover a wide variety of subjects and are of extremely high quality and come in different resolutions. I got to download my first batch of widescreen wallpapers (probably a dozen) from this wonderful resource to use on the Inspiron 640m. There's so much breathtaking scenery that I have a hard time deciding which one to eventually use.
For the rest of the wallpapers I got, I found the Wallpaper Review most useful. The websites listed there with wallpaper selections comparable to those found in InterfaceLIFT are Caedes and Social Wallpapering. Even Wikipedia has a small collection of nice ones. I don't recall finding much in the rest of the websites since I prefer actual photographs (minimal tweaking using PhotoShop is acceptable) to digital art.

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