Images not displaying properly

so i have a new hard drive that i upgraded from Windows XP(i will miss you) to Windows 7. i wanted to get everything settled on it before i transfered it to my regularly used laptop.

i've got nearly everything configured, except for one annoying problem i cannot seem to fix, or find a fix for. all the images displays seem to be squashed height wise. and i mean images online, image files on my computer, even the icons on my desktop. and i cannot for the life of me figure out why! i've tried every setting for resolution, which doesn't make any difference, tried fiddling with display and preferences, tried even changing the theme! it won't do anything. i tried to take a screenshot, but when i transfered it to my regular computer, it looked perfectly fine. so i've taken a side by side picture with my camera to show the differences in the same image. because i love anime and sailor moon, that is the chosen picture for comparison.

good:

bad:

not as bad as some people report, but the higher an image is in height, the more skewed it looks. and some of the images i use tend to be high and it's very annoying. and i'm sure if i try drawing anything that looks normal to me on 7, on everything else it'll look skewed. any help would be greatly appreciated!

also, please note these are pretty much the exact same model of laptop! though it seems to monitors are different...on my XP, it says this for the display

XP: 1. (Multiple Monitors)on ATl Mobility Radeon X1600

Windows 7: 1. Generic PnP Monitor on Standard VGA Graphics Adapter.

maybe this is the issue...? if so, how can i fix it? or is it a graphics card in my XP laptop?(the XP laptop is a bit more souped than the old one/Windows 7. the hard drive with 7 did originally belong to the laptop with the XP harddrive. i just switched them when i couldn't figure out how to transfer over programs and such.)

can someone please help me with this? i posted on another forum and someone said it could be my aspect ratio...but i don't know how to fix that.

If I'm reading you correctly, you are swapping HDDs from laptop to laptop. This not a good idea. If you must move a HDD with Windows 7 on it to a different computer, it can be done with care - I believe preparing a HDD for transfer is called sysprep. There are guides on this forum on sysprep. The usual practice with replacement HDDs is a clean install.

Also even if the laptops are similar, they have different serials for the components so when you swap HDDs, Windows will detect the new hardware as a new pc, and a new activation is needed. If your copy of Windows is retail, it can be moved to a new machine and will activate OK. If the Windows is OEM (regular license - installed when you bought the computer) you can't activate on a different machine - you have to buy a new copy of Windows.

As for your aspect ratio problem - generic monitor and standard vga probably mean no video driver is installed (maybe due to HDD swapping). Standard vga is there just to let you get something on the screen when you are installing Windows. It's usually distorted, but useable until you can get the proper video drivers loaded.

I'd say put the HDDs back in their original laptops and start again from there.

so probably when i swap the windows 7 hard drive to its original laptop, it should fix the issue?

Edtampa said:

so i have a new hard drive that i upgraded from Windows XP(i will miss you) to Windows 7. i wanted to get everything settled on it before i transfered it to my regularly used laptop.

Setting up a new install of Windows 7, then transferring the HDD to a different pc is an odd way to approach things. Sounds like a recipe for trouble IMHO. I'm still not sure why you want to do this. Try asking that question in the installation & setup section, and see what the experts say.

If you just want a quick fix for the bad display, try installing the correct video driver for the laptop concerned. My guess is the driver from laptop #1 is the wrong one for laptop #2.

Also swapping around hardware usually triggers activation problems. 'This copy of Windows is not genuine' is no fun.

well originally when i had gotten the new laptop, didn't want to lose my programs and tried figuring out what to do. my mom just ended up switching the hard drives, because my old laptops speakers were going bad. i figured since i wanted to transfer to the new hard drive because it has more memory space, i would clean up some stuff and transfer my files over and such.

i...guess putting the hard drive in my new laptop should fix it, if the graphic cards are different...which is possible. i'll try it and if not, i'll try opening another thread.