jpeg problems

[pizza roll]

About 5 months ago I bought the Eva Wild Series: Female character creation- part 1 DVD for 3d studio max. I am very impressed how helpful this DVD is but I have a problem. When I try to zoom in on the reference image it becomes very blurry and pixilated, it becomes so bad that it is imposable to work with, especially in more detailed areas such as the face. I have tried mapping the pictures in 3ds max myself and increasing the jpegs over all pixel size, which neither worked. its also not my screen resolution, the DVD asks for 1024x768 and I am sporting 1440x900 on a brand new 19in lcd screen. I have also upgraded my whole computer in the past 2 weeks and this didn’t help either. (for a while I thought it was my older computer that was problem.) so I’m wondering what else to do? I have done other tutorials about modeling the face and such and the jpegs never did this before. If anyone could help that would be great, because I want to use this DVD very badly. (oh and i use 3dmax 8)
thank you