One Weird Trick To Make Your Windows Wallpapers Look Better

If you’re on a Windows PC, and you spend a lot of time looking at your desktop background, there’s one thing you can do that’ll make it look every bit as crisp and detailed as the high quality image you’re starting with.

I was reminded of this by a popular Reddit post by user Neqsis in the r/pcgaming subreddit, but every time I hear about it again I’m reminded of why it happens. By default, Windows will compress your beautiful wallpapers to 85 per cent of their original quality before displaying them on your desktop — a process that adds in artifacting and robs them of fine detail.

There’s a reason for this: it saves a little bit of memory. But PCs these days are so comparatively powerful that it’s really an anachronism for the sake of efficiency, and if you’ve invested in a good monitor and high-end rig you deserve to have it looking its best at all times.

To fix this image-degrading bug feature, you’ll have to dive into your PC’s registry and change a DWORD value: pretty straightforward even if you’re a little unsure of what to do. Just follow the instructions and you’ll have a higher quality wallpaper image displayed in no time.

This is one of those Windows hacks that keeps popping up, and for good reason: the difference is noticeable, especially on higher resolution screens. With more and more enthusiast PC users switching to 1440p, ultrawide or even 4K panels for their everyday computing, having a high quality wallpaper is just one of those nice things to make your computing experience a little more fun.

Here’s exactly what you need to do. [Reddit]


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