Problem: I have connected an addition monitor to my laptop and I’m running it on dual monitor configuration (not clone). Since one screen is bigger than the other, both are running at different resolutions. This causes the wallpaper to appear a little messed up.
Solution: Jon Tackabury’s DisplayFusion is a free application that enables you to use different wallpaper on each monitor. Once installed, the application neatly resides in your system tray. Double clicking the tray icon will bring up the configuration menu, where you can set wallpaper for each monitor.
You can either click on each desktop from the configuration menu and choose different wallpaper for each monitor or span the same wallpaper across both the displays (this is better, if you have two monitors of the same size).

DisplayFusion is capable of fetching wallpapers from Flickr, which his kinda cool because you can save some effort of manually searching the picture.
Download DisplayFusion (441KB)
DisplayFusion works on both Windows Vista and XP. If you are looking for alternative approach without any software (for Windows XP), go here.

wrote, on March 20th, 2008
Thanks. I’ll remember (actually come back to) this post if I need this done. A handy thing to know.
wrote, on March 23rd, 2008
Thanks for the tip!
Finally a faster way for switching between one and two screens
wrote, on March 26th, 2008
Very cool. I just bought a second monitor a few weeks ago and I never realized I could have different wallpaper on each one.
wrote, on March 28th, 2008
thanks for the tip, i’m actually setting up my 2nd monitor when i found this post.
wrote, on April 6th, 2008
This is a great tip for when I use a laptop with a monitor.
At the moment though I’m just going to stick with my 24″ 1900 x 1200 monitor which is absolutely PERFECT!
wrote, on May 10th, 2008
Love the differnt hues in the pictures. Make the screen come alive.
wrote, on July 15th, 2008
Thanks 4 the usefull tips