Tired of the same old Windows wallpaper? You’re not alone, which is why there are a host of tools around which promise they’re the perfect choice to revitalise your desktop. My Daily Wallpaper is the latest: does it have what it takes to stand out from the crowd? We took a look.

Setup was extremely straightforward. The program is a tiny 186KB download, and portable, so there are no installation hassles, no browser toolbars or other unwanted extras. You just unzip the file and go.

My Daily Wallpaper sources its images from DeviantART.com, which means there’s plenty of choice on offer (more than 132,000 wallpapers, as we write). Plainly these won’t all appeal, but you can improve your chances of finding images you’ll like by checking only your favourite categories: Landscapes, Animals & Plants, Science Fiction, Minimalistic and so on.

By default the program works as a simple wallpaper browser. Once you’ve chosen your preferred categories, click the Download button, and it’ll grab and display four images. Which maybe isn’t quite enough. Presumably the author is thinking of performance, and certainly downloading 16 (for instance) high-res images might take a while, but we’d at least like to have the option to download and display more.

Click the Download button and the program will grab four random wallpapers for your perusal

Anyway, at the moment you’ll see four wallpapers randomly chosen from your categories. If you like one, click its “Set as wallpaper” button to place the image on your desktop. And if you don’t, click Download once more and browse the next batch.

If that sounds like too much hassle, though, you can alternatively check the “Autostart with Windows and download a new wallpaper” box, and the program will then automatically choose and set a new wallpaper for you every time you log on.

If you don’t like this image then you can still download another by choosing the appropriate right-click option from the My Daily Wallpaper system tray icon, though. And in a nice touch, the program doesn’t waste resources by running there indefinitely. The developer has realised that users will really only need it to replace wallpapers they don’t like, and so if you’ve not used the program after a few minutes then it’ll assume you’re happy and automatically close.

There’s nothing too exceptional here, then, but My Daily Wallpaper does provide easy access to lots of images, and is compact, simple to use and makes minimal demand on your system resources. If your desktop could benefit from a new look then the program should definitely be able to help.