Screen Resolution & Display

Question

My screen default resolution is 1680 X 1050. Its difficult to read anything with this resolution. So, I decreased the resolution. When I decrease the screen resolution to 1200 X 800, Fonts turned to dim. When I changed the resolution it gave message the best/optimal resolution for your lcd is 1680 X 1050. Cannot I change it to lesser resolution?

ejn63 · Answer

Only if are willing to sacrifice some clarity. The other option is to increase the font size and leave the resolution set to the native values.

anettis · Answer

When buying a laptop it is of paramount importance to choose an LCD with a native resolution that you are comfortable using for text, graphics, webpages, etc.  There is no perfect solution to the problem you are facing.   I made a similar mistake myself with the WUXGA screen as it sports a whopping resolution of 1920 * 1200.  Don't get me wrong this is a magnificent screen that is probably better than more than 90% of the laptops on the market.  The downside is that at this text is TINY.  I use a docking station 95% of the time, so this makes the problem even worse as I am further from the screen than when using the laptop keyboard.     I tried changing the Windows font size, but this seems to only impact Windows related text - not specific application text.  To try to remedy the problem I have changed the windows DPI setting from the standard 96 DPI to 144 DPI (150% of normal).  This makes text and icons much more readable.  The only downside is that a small percentage of webpages/applicaitons don't scale properly when not using the standard windows 96 DPI setting.  (I believe this is due to the windows graphics API not yet fully supporting non-standard DPI settings.)  On those webpages/applications the screens don't render properly - although most of the time they are still usable, they just are just a little warped.   Tony   Message Edited by anettis on 11-06-2004 08:43 PM

mikebk · Answer

I made the same mistake too.

I tried to change the desktop dpi but found that broke a number of critical applications. As a result, I found a freeware proxy server and use it to adjust the size of small characters (typically specified in css stylesheets using px font sizes) in web pages. The result is that I can read web pages much more easily but that the layout probably doesn't look like what its designer intended. I'm not particularly artistic so that's fine for me. If the page designer was concerned, they wouldn't use small absolute (e.g., px, em) font sizes.

Mike

anettis · Answer

Mike,   Could you point me to the freeware proxy server - I would like to check it out?   The good news is that it sounds like Microsoft is aware of this growing issue and will address it in the next major OS release:   http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;EN-US;Q820286   Tony

mikebk · Answer

I'm using a program called the Proxomitron which you can find out about at http://www.proxomitron.info/index.html. The orginal author stopped work on it (see http://www.geocities.com/srl_list/index.html for some alternatives) but it's been absolutely solid for me so I've continued using it. If you like, I can send you a copy of my configuration file which has the filters I'm using.

Unfortunately, I think Microsoft's resolution of the problem is in the Avalon graphics environment. It was expected as part of Longhorn but I think it was split out. This means we're talking about 2006, 2007 or later.

Mike

anettis · Answer

Thanks for the links.  I am guessing those utilities only impact web pages - so it would not really help with stand alone applications that are not rendering correctly at 144 DPI.   As far as Microsoft getting this fixed . . . looks like I will be downgrading the screen resolution on my next laptop purchase(s) - at least until Avalon is available.    :smileysurprised:

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Screen Resolution & Display

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