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Help me explain to her why she should not do this

W

wpshooter

Golden Member
I am doing some work in try to help my niece get her computer connected to her high speed internet service provider.

But one of the things that I noticed about her computer while working on it was, that she has a photograph (which she apparently took with her digital camera) of her dog as the desktop background for her XP operating system.

I noticed that when I would go into the properties of the display section, that when I attempted to exit out of the display properties screen/section (whether I had made any changes or not to the display properties), that it would take a very long time for the display properties diagonal/window to close.

BUT when I decided to change her background from the digital picture of her dog to any of the backgrounds that are a part of XP, then the display properties screen would close IMMEDIATELY, i.e. no lag or delay.

Am I correct that she should not be using this digital picture as a desktop background because it is taking a great deal of computer resources to maintain this digital image on the display as the background ? A more technical explanation of this is welcome if you have one.

Thanks.
 
If that's truly the cause (she must have a very slow computer already). You could just shrink the image down to a smaller file size.
 
Originally posted by: Wreckage
If that's truly the cause (she must have a very slow computer already). You could just shrink the image down to a smaller file size.
Click to expand...

Well, the computer is not exactly the latest and greatest but then I would not say that is exactly a slouch either. It is a Dell Laptop, I think model number is 9300 and it is about 2 years old. I don't know the exact specs. of it at the moment, since I am at work.

Thanks.

 
Seems odd to me... I don't see why a 2-3MB picture (assuming it's a normal sized .jpg) would cause the computer to slow down.
 
Originally posted by: wpshooter
I am doing some work in try to help my niece get her computer connected to her high speed internet service provider.

But one of the things that I noticed about her computer while working on it was, that she has a photograph (which she apparently took with her digital camera) of her dog as the desktop background for her XP operating system.

I noticed that when I would go into the properties of the display section, that when I attempted to exit out of the display properties screen/section (whether I had made any changes or not to the display properties), that it would take a very long time for the display properties diagonal/window to close.

BUT when I decided to change her background from the digital picture of her dog to any of the backgrounds that are a part of XP, then the display properties screen would close IMMEDIATELY, i.e. no lag or delay.

Am I correct that she should not be using this digital picture as a desktop background because it is taking a great deal of computer resources to maintain this digital image on the display as the background ? A more technical explanation of this is welcome if you have one.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

I doubt she cares about the lag and would rather keep her dog as the desktop background.

 
This is called Active Desktop. You are correct; it uses more system resources than using one of the included wallpapers or no wallpaper.

However, it's not exactly a system hog unless the machine is seriously underpowered (I believe it was a bigger problem in the Windows 98 era).

These actions will have a much larger impact on system performance:
Defragment the hard drive
Uninstall unnecessary programs
Disable unnecessary startup programs
Check how much RAM is on the computer - 1GB is recommended for a basic Win XP machine.
 
You could just save Her pic as a BMP, disable active desktop and then use the BMP as Her background. That way everyone is happy.
 
She probably would rather keep the picture of her dog. I think the picture just needs to be resized. My average 5MP camera can take pictures which are a lot bigger than most screens need.
 
Originally posted by: Wreckage
You could just save Her pic as a BMP, disable active desktop and then use the BMP as Her background. That way everyone is happy.
Click to expand...

I'll try that, thanks.

 
You think that's bad? I once worked on a computer, a P-MMX 166, with an animated GIF as a desktop background. You could watch it updating the screen every time the frame updated. It was scaling the image on the CPU too, no accelerated video hardware. (Did Win98se even support accelerated video hardware? I have no idea any more.)
 
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