Bad desktop wallpaper quality

[Hartman]

Alright guys, this is somewhat of a minor problem but it's really buggin me. I have a widescreen laptop (1280x800), and I used to put regular (1024x768) wallpapers on it and it would stretch them out fine, and I didn't loose any detectable image quality. Now, out of the blue, if I try to apply a non-widescreen wallpaper, it distorts the image (jagged, unclear, etc.). Does anyone know why this would change out of the blue, and how can I get it back to the way it was?

Thanks.

 

[southernlady]

Check the image quality of the rest of the graphics on your desktop, have they changed? Liz

 

[Hartman]

No, all the images are perfect when I open them up in a graphics program.

 

[southernlady]

I don't mean in your graphics program but on the desktop itself. Liz

 

[Hartman]

Yes my icons look a little jagged too.

 

[southernlady]

Do you have somewhere to back up your critical files NOW!!! When that happened to me, I d@mned near lost everything, My system went unstable in a hurry and I had to reformat. Liz

 

[Hartman]

Yeah I do, but can you give me more details?

 

[southernlady]

It looked like something had taken a scrubby to the icons on my desktop...I was frantically moving files that I couldn't afford to lose cause not all mine were duplicated elsewhere. I spent 3 hours in the middle of the night copying folders praying I wouldn't go down and then about halfway thru, things started going critical. I almost lost it three times but I made it.

To this day I don't know what caused it. Liz

 

[ekÆsine]

Hartman I've seen that happen on a widescreen laptop before. The only thing I could suggest is experiment with your desktop resolution or resize the images before using them for your wallpaper. I think this is an incompatiblity between windows XP and your display device. I don't think microsoft thought about widescreen laptops when they designed XP because they are new technology as far as I know. Formating is a bit extreme and it won't solve anything

 

[Hartman]

I've tried pretty much everything I can think of. Everything worked fine before but I guess I just have to deal with it.