Win XP style background wanted

On my Win XP screen I have a blue background and centered is a photo which takes up about 1/4 of the screen area, centered up and down, left and right. How can I get the same effect in Win7? If I try to use the same photo it goes full screen. Harry

Hi havant - Welcome to w7forums

Control Panel >> Appearance and Personalization >> Personalization >> Desktop Background

select "Center" for "Picture position:"

No not what I meant. I can find all of the colors etc but again what I want is a picture about 5x7 inches centered on my 21 inch screen. So far I can get the pic but it is always full screen not small. If I try to use a small pic Windows just makes it full screen.

If you select "Center" the image will not be stretched.

If the image still fills the screen after you select "Center" then the image resolution is larger than your desktop area.

Well I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but I'll keep at it. The photo I'm trying to use is a bmp type file, 793 kb in size. When I open it in IrfanView it shows it to be 640x423x24BPP which is a long ways under my 21 inch SyncMaster monitor. Win7 insists on making it full screen. I really miss the display settings on XP, at least I was familar with them. Thanks for your response.

The size of your screen (21", 45") does not matter, what matters is the resolution. What screen resolution is set? On an 800x600 display that image will fill about 3/4ths of the screen, on my 2048x1152 display it would be smaller than 1/3 of the screen (only if you have it set for center, any other options will stretch the picture in some fashion).

My screen resolution is 1600 x 1200. I'll just keep working on this as time permits. I'm convinced that it can be done. Let's face it this is not a can't use the computer without it type of thing. Harry

As an update - I got it working!!! I opened the picture (jpeg) format with IrfanView and set image size to 1600 x 1200. Of course the photo filled the screen. Next I set a margin of 1600 minus 640 and the blue color almost identical to what I had on the XP system. I saved that jpeg and used it for a new theme. Thanks for convincing me that it could be done! Harry

If your image was 640x423 then it would not fill a 1600x1200 box, so one or the other width x height pairs was inaccurate but I'm glad you're happy now.

Strangely I was going to suggest "Photoshopping" it.