Q I have a Power Macintosh G3/266 I bought last year with 8MB of video memory. If I use a Desktop Picture in the Finder rather than a pattern, the screen takes a long time to redraw, leaving bits of the underlying Desktop Pattern exposed. My Mac reseller says the video RAM might be faulty, but I think other things would be going wrong if that were the case. What should I do?

A The problem youÆre describing does sound like a memory problem, but not with your SGRAM. When you use a picture on the desktop, the Mac scales it to fit the screen. Apple provides a number of pictures on the Mac OS CD that are optimised for this purpose. Other pictures (JPEGs off the Net, for instance) might not be so optimised, forcing the OS to do extra processing to scale them. This processing becomes less efficient if the Finder is running out of memory (you can find out if this is the case by looking at the "About This Computer" item in the Apple menu). For best results with desktop pictures, make sure you use pics that are the same size as your screen (eg 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high) and at a resolution of 72dpi. Also, restrict them to 256 colours.