Windows XP, desktop background issues (widescreen monitor)

[jbzeigler]

I have a 19" widescreen monitor and am running Windows XP Home SP3. My resolution is set at 1440x990. When I change my desktop background to a picture from my digital camera it offers me three solutions: stretch, center, tiled. Stretch stretches the image to fit the monitor so the picture looks stretched to widescreen. Makes sense. The center is so blown out of proportion though and doesn't look right at all. It's like it's zoomed in on the center of the picture at all? How can I make it look "normal" with a black border or something? Am I missing something here?

 

[ender]

Your picture was taken with a higher resolution that the one your monitor has. Use an image editing program to resize it so that it has a height of 990px and then apply it as a wallpaper with the 'centered' option.

 

[jbzeigler]

What freeware software would work good for that type of scenario?

 

[ender]

The MS Paint supplied with Windows will do that for you but the interface is rather annoying. If you're only interested in the resizing part, you can also get the Image Resizer power toy from MS (direct download link). This article will describe what it does (scroll down a bit to find it).

For more that just resizing, the best free image editing solution is The Gimp (very stupid name, I know, but it's very powerful). The direct download link for windows is here