The Background tab was slightly enhanced with the introduction of the Active Desktop. Instead of simply showing the choice of pictures or patterns to be centred or tiled, it allows you to choose a picture with a drop down menu of where you want it to display. For the patterns there is a new button that opens a small dialog where you can choose a pattern. In that it shows a preview of the screen that shows how the tiles would wrap around any Active Desktop elements that you have running.

The top part of this tab remains the same as in Windows 95. You can choose any installed screen savers from the drop down menu. Each of the Screen Savers will have individual settings, accessed from the Settings button, that allow you to change elements of the Screen Saver - this might be text that is displayed, speed of movement or rotation of movement, number of elements shown, etc. These parameters are useful not only from an aesthetic, but also from a technical point of view. If you have a very busy Screen Saver running on a low spec PC, you can reduce the speed of movement so that it does not appear jerky. The settings available are specified by the individual Screen Saver, not by the system, so settings that appear in one Screen Saver may not appear in another. You can press the Preview button to see the Screen Saver, though a preview may, if supported by the Screen Saver, be played in the monitor above the boxes. You can also define a password, which will have to be typed in by a user to re-access the desktop after the Screen Saver has started, and the delay wanted before the Screen Saver starts. See also Desktop Themes

The Energy Saving settings have been changed. Before you could define when a compatible monitor would go into Standby and when it would Shut Off. Now there is just a Settings button which opens the Power Management Control Panel that came with OSR2. In that you can define the Power Settings for both the monitor and hard drives or just choose a scheme that suits your PC specifications. This is a continuation of Microsoft's OnNow initiative.

The only tab to remain fully intact. There are no changes here at all. You can choose a colour scheme for the colour of title bars and all the other Windows colours - the grey boxes and dialogs, etc. The Item Drop down menu determines which part of the OS GUI you are adjusting and can change everything from Scroll bars to icons. You can change fonts, background colours and more. See also Desktop Themes, Customising your folders, Accessibility

The new tab added by IE4; this controls the Active Desktop. The check box "View my Active Desktop as a web page" enables you to show HTML web pages as part of your desktop.

If you are viewing WWW pages as a backdrop, then the check box list allows you to decide which elements are displayed. When you add an item as an Active item, it will appear in the list with a tick box. If you have an element enabled, you will see a preview of its screen position in the monitor picture above the buttons. Active elements can be moved around the Desktop on the Desktop itself. To enable/disable all Active items, click on the View my Active Desktop as a web page tick box. See Adding an item, TweakUI IE4 settings tab

The button, Folder Options, will close the Display Properties and open the Folder Options properties.

A brand new tab? Not quite. In early betas of the system, this was simply called the Plus! tab, rather unsurprising as it adds in all the features from that tab that came with the Windows 95 Plus! pack. There have been two changes made. The Stretch wallpaper to fit screen option has gone, presumably because these days wallpaper comes with versions to fit different screen resolutions.

Added in are two new check boxes. The first is the ability to hide the desktop icons from view if the screen is displayed as a web page. The second new check box enables you to stop the animation of the menus and windows. The animation of the menus and lists is a new feature in Windows 98 and one that most people notice first, but the window animation refers to the shrinking and expanding of windows to and from the taskbar that Windows 95 has always performed. If you want control over the individual elements of the animation, so that the Windows animated, but the drop down combo boxes or menus don't then the new version of TweakUI allows you to do this.

The other features of the Effects tab are identical to the Plus! pack ones. You can choose different icons for individual system icons, like the Recycle bin. (If you want to remove system icons from the Desktop altogether so they are never displayed, again you can do this through TweakUI.) See also Desktop Themes

The remaining tick boxes are fairly self explanatory - use large icons, use all colours for icons, smooth fonts and show windows contents as you drag a window, instead of just showing an outline as was done under the initial release of Windows 95 (OSR2 had this feature). See also Accessibility

There are several changes made to this tab. On the surface, it is only the new tick box that is different from OSR2, which removed the simple Change Display Type button and replaced it with an Advanced button for better control and swapping of video cards. The new tick box will appear greyed out on most people's monitor the first time they use Windows 98, because it only refers to systems that have multiple monitors attached. If you do have this, then you can choose not only to have the new monitor used by the system, but also to have the desktop items, like toolbars, extended to the monitor. Obviously if you only have one monitor, then it has to be the one to display the desktop items.

Click on the Advanced tab and you'll open a whole new section. Under OSR2 some improvements had been made. Here there are new tabs again offering a lot of new features.

The new General tab allows you to change the DPI of font displayed on the screen so you can use large fonts, etc. This was previously available in the standard part of the Settings tab. You can also choose to display the QuickRes icon in the taskbar which gives you instant access to the Display properties and to quickly change the resolution.

The Compatability section from the Performance tab of OSR2 has been moved to here too. This allows you to define what should happen if you make changes to the screen resolution. Some programs will crash the system if the changes are made on the fly rather than after re-starting the system, as Windows 95 used to have to do. You can decide here whether you want Windows 98 to make the change without restarting, restart automatically or, as is the default, to ask you every time you change the resolution how you want to do it.

Another tab that looks, on the face of it, the same as the OSR2 one, but is in fact updated. It still gives the information about the adapter (video card) and the refresh rate, which you can adjust from the drop down menu. However, now if you click on the Change button, instead of jumping directly to the Add New Hardware user choice section for video cards, displaying compatible devices installed on the system, it opens the Update Driver Wizard.