Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Resolution and Screen Size

I'll be posting solutions to the minor irritations when running windows xp that can make or break your day.
I have a IBM T-43 Laptop (now the IBM's PC division has been taken over by Lenovo), powered by ATi X300. And I found that when I resized/decrease my resolution, the screen size would decrease proportionally. It was very irritating for I could not test the web apps I made at multiple resolutions without squinting at the screen. A bigger problem was that computer games run at lower resolutions, and that meant I had to play on a smaller screen. I like playing arcade games through dos-based emulators (go mame!). And as you know, DOS supports a maximum resolution of 640x480. This meant I had to play on a screen area of 8" on my 15" laptop. Madness!

You can easily correct that by changing your display settings. This might depend on your graphics card and the available software provided by the card vendor. For my ATi, go to the Display Properties(Right Click>Properties; or Control Panel>Display), switch to the Settings tab, and click on "Advanced". Then click on the "Displays" tab, which lists the available displays that you can send the video output to. Click on my LCD panel which pops up its properties. Check "Scale Image to Panel Size". Done.
And all this time I had been blaming "ATi Tray Tools" for this experience. Too lazy, I guess. Or dumb.

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