So you have the luxury of running a secondary monitor next to your primary one, which is great for dumping reference material on to while you work on something on the primary monitor. However by default when you set up two monitors in Windows, the wallpaper of the primary monitor will also be applied to the secondary monitor.

This can be annoying for two reasons: 1) You want a different wallpaper on that second monitor as a preference and 2) The two monitors may have different aspect ratios and so on the secondary monitor the wallpaper will either get squashed or cropped. The settings don’t appear to allow you to change the wallpaper of the second screen when you set up dual monitors, but in this short tutorial you will be shown how to achieve just this within Windows XP. It doesn’t involve any hacks to Windows or extra software. The process described below may be different for Windows Vista and 7...

1. After you have the two monitors set up, right click the desktop and go to 'properties'.
2. Click the 'Desktop' Tab
3. Click 'Customize Desktop'
4. Click the 'Web' Tab
5. Click 'New' and then 'Browse'
6. Navigate to where the wallpaper for the second monitor can be found, Click 'Open' and then 'OK' on the original screen.
7. Keep clicking 'OK' until all the windows are closed.
8. On the primary desktop you should now have the wallpaper displayed. Hover the cursor towards the top of the wallpaper and a menu bar will appear. Click and drag on the menu bar to move the wallpaper over to the secondary monitor.
9. On the left of this menu bar there is an arrow, click it and in the drop down menu click 'Cover Desktop'.
10. Job done, now you have a wallpaper for each desktop. Nifty eh?

You could of course have anything displayed here, even a web page such as iGoogle or the like without having to have your browser open all the time.