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6157
Dell XPS 13 9343 External Display issues
Hi there,
I use a Dell XPS 13 9343 as my work computer. I am now upgrading to an external monitor setup for it. The resolution or scaling for the display has never been 100% right, and when I connect the device to the external monitor it is virtually unusable. Individual programs show up ok, such as Microsoft Word, but the main Windows taskbar is too big, and no matter the resolution the desktop icons are huge. I have changed and tried every setting/option I can find both in the built-in control panel display options, and the Intel HD Graphics program.
Any suggestions or solutions would be appreciated, thank you
jphughan
14K Posts
1
March 1st, 2018 10:00
The screenshots didn't come through (common problem on this forum at the moment), but if you're trying to use the external and built-in panels simultaneously, scaling issues are a pretty likely occurrence, especially if the two displays have significantly different pixel densities. Basically Windows can only optimize for one pixel density at a time, and it does so for whichever display is designated as primary. For any other attached and active displays, it uses a variety of techniques to adjust an image that was natively rendered with the primary panel's pixel density in mind to an appropriate image for the actual display that will be showing the content. This has been getting better over successive releases of Windows 10, but it's still not perfect; a non-primary display in this scenario will never look as good as it will when Windows is optimizing for it as a result of it being the primary/only display. Additionally, even different applications can perform vastly differently based on whether or not they support some of the new features Microsoft has been adding to improve this. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also been adding mechanisms to try to force better scaling for legacy applications that might no longer be maintained, separately from the efforts to add new frameworks that applications can directly code support for, and as you might expect, forcing scaling through a variety of tricks and workarounds also has varying degrees of success.
Also note that if you change your display configuration while logged on in a way that the display designated as primary changes (e.g. you connect an external display and Windows remembers that you want that to be primary), then Windows will adapt its scaling in-place, but even that won't make the new primary display look as good as if you log off Windows and log back in so that the session BEGINS with that display designated as primary, because some applications don't handle a scaling optimization change within a Windows session, even if they weren't open at the time.
gmuge7
2 Posts
0
March 2nd, 2018 01:00
Thank you. The logging off then back on again trick has (by the looks of things) solved my issues.
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gmuge7