You may have noticed that with all the screen resolution changing software over the last few days, that your wallpaper does not want to play the game. If you change your resolution with a dual monitor setup, the wallpaper of your secondary monitor will change to the size of your main monitor. This is a little ugly and I can understand that in some scenarios, you may want a solution to make this much prettier.

Along comes DisplayFusion which will solve this problem for you, as it has done for me. DisplayFusion is a great utility to look after the wallpaper of your dual monitor setup.

You are able to stretch your wallpaper across multiple monitors, select a different wallpaper for each desktop as well as the ability to use images from flickr as your wallpaper.

If you change your resolution, DisplayFusion will recognise this and give you a balloon popup to adjust your wallpaper to suit. With 2 clicks, you can be back in action. Look out for future versions as this hopefully will become an automatic feature. Worth noting is that your Windows wallpapers are normally stored in your “C:\Windows\Web” folder

While this application won’t be suitable for all scenarios, it is great for anyone wanting more control over their dual monitor configuration. I thank the How-to Geek for letting me know of this.

Available from Binary Fortress. That’s enough screen resolution stuff from IMG for a while.

Last week I showed you Reschange 3.11 which is a command line utility to change your screen resolution. Since then, Cybernetnews has reported on a tiny utility called JRes, otherwise known as JustinRes. I didn’t know of this utility previously and it is worth comparing the two as they both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

This utility clocks in at a tiny 5kb and runs in your tasktray. Once you click on it, you get to switch between a whole range of resolutions, refresh rates as well as bit depth, covering just about any resolution you might want.

This is great for quick resolution changes and it works well. To make it run at startup, place the executable in your Start Menus –> Startup folder. This will do the job for me changing resolutions. The only drawback I found with JRes is that it lacks dual monitor support.

As with ResChange, there is no 15 second revert if you enter into a resolution your monitor or card does not support. Worth keeping in mind is Windows Safe Mode which will get you out of this dilemma. Press F8 just before Windows starts up and then you can enter safe mode to set the resolution back to whatever you would like.

So take your pick, JRes for speed, and Reschange for more configuration control. It all depends on how often you want to change your resolution and for whatever reason.

Available from Nullsoft.

Joystick 2 mouse lets you use your game controller to move your mouse around the screen, and a whole lot more. You can do just about any Windows function with this program, including typing (though this would be a nightmare), all from your game controller.

The reason I looked into this was so that I could control Windows Media Centre from my couch. I had all sorts of problems finding a suitable tool. Eventually I came across this gem. After installing it, I found out that it could do much more than I initially wanted. There is no reason why it could not be configured to control first person shooter games.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to change almost every aspect of it. You can use it to control any application. The only drawback I found was that there was no option to disable/enable this utility from the controller. Disabling it is possible by exiting the program, but without the program open, you can no longer use your controller to re-launch the program.

Logitech users would probably be best using the profiler software which can be downloaded from their website. This will allow similar functionality.

Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is available for free from the authors website, or get it from Tucows.

Most applications are best run at a high resolution to ensure you have plenty of screen space, however some games require you to change your screen resolution to a setting which the game supports.

To change your screen resolution, you would generally need to go into your display properties and tinker with a few settings. While this is easy enough to do occasionally, if it is something you want to do regularly, it becomes quite an annoying process. It gets even worse if you require low resolutions, as they are not always made available to you here. You would need to go further and enter into the advanced section of your display properties to switch between the resolutions.

I constantly need to switch between 1280×1024 and 640×480, as my CRT TV only supports the lower resolution. I used ResChange to setup some desktop shortcuts to make the job much quicker and easier. I can also see this being useful for a range of scenarios such as wide-screen laptops connecting to 16:9 projectors on a regular basis.

ResChange is a command line utility which will do as the name suggests, change your resolution. You can apply a whole range of switches such as height, width, frequency, as well as telling ResChange which monitor to do the change to if you have dual screen setup (defaults to monitor 1).

Once installed, I made shortcuts with the following switches:

For 640×480 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=640 -height=480 -refresh=60

For 1280×1024 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=1280 -height=1024 -refresh=max

While compatibility mode would allow me to run some things at the lower resolution, not all programs support it, so changing the resolution of Windows was best. This has worked flawlessly for me in both XP and Vista. If you need a range of resolutions, you could make a start menu group with multiple shortcuts for various resolutions in there.

(Update 4/8/08: This is now called Display Changer. There are some new features whcih make it even more handy.)

Available for free from Softpedia.

The open-source community has done it again with another spectacular piece of software. Audacity is an audio editing/recording software package for your computer which can be as simple or complex as you would like.

At one stage of my life, I was right into using fancy audio software, using Cakewalk, Vegas and Pro Tools to record bands in my loft. I would then use Sound Forge to edit the individual tracks, spending hours on each song to get it right for a release. All of these pieces of software are good, but they are not cheap, costing much more than they really should.

Times have changed, and now all I want is a program that is easy to use and that works well. Audacity is the program for me, as not only will it do everything I want from an audio editor, it is free.

It can as easy to use as loading it up and pressing the record button to record either sounds you hear on your computer, or audio from an external source. It is an ideal application for converting your vinyl to a digital format. Windows sound recorder looks pathetic next to Audacity.

Audacity can also be used for more advanced tasks such as multi-track recording, allowing you to record multiple tracks at once. There are a huge range of special effects you can add to your tracks which are all easy to use and understand. It even shows wave forms as they are created in real time. 

Over the coming days, I will be using Audacity in many of the How-To articles as it is the best tool to use for what we are trying to achieve.

The program itself is very small and runs very fast. Available from SourceForge.