Well, this has been a bit of a learning process! Thanks for the heads up on Photoshop. Unfortunately, I don't have that program and being a miserly bugger I went for the freeware route, with much better results than bloody MS Paint!
To convert the picture of your choice to a 256 colour bitmap, you will need
Paint.NET and MS Paint as well. Once you have them, the process itself is really simple.
1
) In Paint.NET: resize the picture to the size for your device.
2
) Save as a .gif and set the dithering to maximum
(i.e. 8
)
3
) In MS Paint: open your new .gif and save it as a 256 colour .bmp.
Voila!
Basically, Paint.NET does all the dithering, but cannot save it as a bitmap, so you still need MS Paint.
Anyway, I am attaching the Gigabar file. I'm afraid that all I did was modify your XP Luna file, so all the filenames are the same
(although the taskbar skin graphic has changed
) - you might want to correct that. The blue orb, unfortunately, is still pretty big so minimized windows still encroach on it
(as you can see above
), but generally this is not too big a problem.
I've also not attached any wallpapers as these can simply be found by googling images for "Vista Wallpaper", but if you like I can zip some up in SVGA-sized JPEGs and send them along too!
Edited by ZSX 2006-05-19 1:01 PM