Latitude D610 screen display problems

Dirtyfingers, Steerpipe,

 

I had exactly the same problem on my just received Latitude D610 with 1400x1050 screen. Dell obviously chooses (don't ask me why) to set the DPI setting to "large size (120 DPI)" (125%) by default on installation. I guess they chose to do this to reduce the number of complaints about small characters, but Internet Explorer scales up all images on a website as well, and that really looks terrible.

 

I never changed this setting before on other computer, so it took me a while to find it. Steerpipe's suggestion helped. Thanks!

 

Dirtyfingers, to change it back to "normal", go to "Display Properties" (right-click on your desktop), choose the "settings" tab, and click on "Advanced". You will see that the DPI-setting is probably currently at 120 DPI. Change this back to 96 DPI, and reboot. All will be fine then (but yep... all characters will be a little smaller too, that's what you get with a 1400x1050 pixel screen).

 

Christian

It amazes me that they sell, for a higher price, the 'sxga' version which runs at 1400x, on such a tiny physical screen.  It's a case of 'specification wars', I think - they fear that people are comparing the products from different vendors, and are worried that they will overlook 'their' (dell's) product if they show a resolution of 'only' 1024x768.  So people buy the higher res version thinking it's better, then can't see the darned display, so end up doing 'bad' things like change the dpi settings or similar to 'compensate' - then run into issues like this.  The sad fact is, many common windows apps don't "play well" with anything but the default dpi setting.  And of course, running any lcd screen at anything but it's "native" setting looks awful. 

 

As an aside, I have the xga version - 1024x768 - but it is capable of driving external monitors at much higher resolutions - so I can drive my external 19" LCD screen at 1280x1024 without any problem. 

 

I wasn't aware that Dell were now shipping their sxga versions with non-standard dpi's - I can see why, but ... oh my, they are going to have a lot of unhappy customers! 

Normall IE doesn't scale images even with 120dpi fonts.  Dell has done something to enable this.

Well, you can keep the 120dpi fonts for most apps, and turn of the image scaling in IE, by running the dell app: C:\dell\drivers\R98539\IEScale.exe

 

BTW, thanks DELL for providing the utility to enable 120DPI graphics in IE!  I personally prefer it.  It seems to scale the boxes that contain the larger text, making things layout the way they were meant to look, only larger.  If I want to see pics without the scale, I use mozilla.