Poor Desktop Image Displays

having recently built my computer with the help of many IT Experts i have the following annoyance. As my pc is booting up, just before my desktop settles down, it displays my wallpaper picture perfect. Once my desktop has refreshed itself and placed all my shortcuts on, the image deteriorates slightly. I have 98 SE. Similarly on the desktop theme of travel at 1024x760 the image is again gritty and not totally smooth, however it is at 800x600. If I open a picture in photo express 2 and save it as my wallpaper it appears perfectly clear. I know it is only a little problem, but it really bugs me, especially as I want to get into digital photography when I buy a scanner at xmas. I have a 64mb geforce2 mx 400 graphics card, 1.3 athlon 512mb ddr ram, 40gb hard drive etc, etc. Also when i run a program called eye2eye (pictures of thge uk) these are also shown rather gritty, but again when seen at 800x600 they are a lot clearer. Oh I have a 17" monitor. Any help would be grateful. I have tried detonator 4 on someones advice and it did nothing.

 

The clarity depends on what resolution and color depth the original pictures were created at. If your PC is set to 1024 x 768 32bit color and you create an image in a graphics app and save it, it will not look the same viewed at 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 and visa versa. Most people save graphics at 800 x 600 so they are pretty much everyone can view them correctly. If you made an image at 800 x 600 and viewd it at 100% at 1024 x 768 the image would of course become distorted from it's original state. Same thing goes for web page development.