19" UltraSharp 1905FP

Not sure why this is...did you load the drivers for the monitor from the CD?

Specifically, does Windows 'know' what monitor you have? Right-click on an empty spot on your desktop, select Properties and then switch to the Settings tab. What does it say for Display?

 

If it says "Plug and Play" then you are just using the generic monitor drivers. Did a quick search on Dell's site and found these, which are for the 1905FP:

http://ftp.us.dell.com/monitors/R86319.EXE

You don't have a problem.

Most web pages don't fill the whole page, width wise, at 1280x1024 resolution.
This is because web sites are designed to be seen also by folks with lower resolutions without the need to scroll.

It's all up to the designer of the site. On this forum, you can select to fill the whole frame or not within your profile display settings. By default, it is only 800 pixels wide.

Yes, he/she does have a problem - & I have the same. We bought the dell 1905fp monitor about a year ago & have had the exact same problem - condensed web sites. To illustrate, we bought a 19" flat panel from HP a few months ago & on websites that the dell monitor only takes up half or 2/3 of the page, the HP monitor shows them beautifully on the entire page. Several months ago I did try updating the driver - & I checked again after reading these posts & the properties/settings menu does list the dell 1905fp rather than just plug & play. We also have a regular monitor attached to the computer as well. I have been trying to fix this problem since we got the monitor & was glad to find this post in which someone else is having the same problem. I thought I might try & download the listed drivers just for the heck of it, but if anyone has any other ideas, I'd appreciate it!

Just to clarify, the dell 1905fp & the non-flat panel 19" are on 1 computer & the HP flat panel is on another computer.

Out of curiousity, your comparison is only really valid if all three monitors are running at the same resolution - is that the case?

The resolution on my HP monitor is 800x600 - and as I said it displays all websites perfectly. The dell 1905fp monitor is at 1280x1024. I have tried switching it to 800x600 but then the icons & everything else are huge. I have tried different resolutions but it makes no difference.

Ok, which explains why you are seeing what you are seeing... and what CTskydiver meant. By saying they "didn't have a problem", he was just trying to say that there's nothing physically wrong with the monitor. It's more of a "nature of the beast" issue and what happens when you run at higher resolution.

Some websites adjust themselves to fill the browser frame at higher resolutions and others (like this one) don't. For example, I'm on a wide-screen 2405 Dell monitor, running at 1920x1200 and there is a big chunk of white nothing over to the right of this box right now. Just the way it is, I'm afraid.

Okay, I just went to the dell monitor computer & switched it to 800x600 & brought up one of the websites I have trouble with & although it did fill the screen, everything was huge & it was still a bit jumbled. On the computer I'm using the HP on, the icons are a normal size (with 800x600 res.). It just doesn't make sense to me that on 1 monitor I have normal size icons & all web pages look great and on the other computer with the dell monitor my desktop looks ok at 1280x1024 but I cannot get certain websites to look right no matter what resolution I use. Are there any setting adjustments I can make? As I said before, I did update the drivers (since we bought the monitor) and the settings show the dell 1905fp monitor (rather than just plug & play) but maybe I should try updating them again??

I know it can be a little confusing for someone used to CRTs (especially ones running at such a low resolution as 800x600) when they first cross over to the LCD world, but no driver update is going to help.

Basically, you've got to get this notion that certain websites don't "look right" out of your head and accept the fact that they will look different on your new LCD running at a higher resolution. As you've also noted, you really don't want to set your LCD monitor's resolution down to 800x600 as everything will look HUGE and will more than likely be ugly / blurry. There is less of an issue with running a modern LCD at less than its native rez as the way they do the image 'scaling' seems to be greatly improved, but you don't want to go down too much... and you can't get much lower than 800x600. Best to run it at the native rez unless the fonts then are literally too small for you to read. There are other tricks you can pull with the Accessability options or with certain setting in IE itself that can help as well if things are ok elsewhere but hard to read in your browser.

Bottom line is that's just the way it is. You've got so much more screen real estate on your new LCD at 1280x1024, you'll really shouldn't be wanting to view websites full screen any more. You had no choice on your old CRT as that was the best it could do, now you can have a website up and still see alot of your desktop. Which means access to email or word processing or something else at the same time. And yes, if you open up your web browser big enough, sites that are built for the least common denominator - 800x600 - and that don't play nice and auto-format themselves to the expanded size, will have a big chunk of white emptiness over on the right-hand side. Nature of the beast.

Hope this helps.

As more and more web users move to higher resolution monitors, more and more web sites will start taking advantage of that "extra white space". Web sites I frequently visit who recently started using more real estate include espn.com (as mentioned) and, just within the last week or two, the All Music Guide (http://www.allmusic.com/). The former web site is justified to the left edge of your browser window while the latter (worth checking out!) centers its content.

If you don't like the "wasted" white space, there's no reason you need to have your browser window maximized. You can reduce the size of the browser window and still allow yourself access to other elements or windows on your desktop if you like.

Now, as for the user who doesn't understand why his icons are bigger on one monitor at 800x600 than they are on another monitor also at 800x600 -- I'll explain two reasons this may be.

First, if one monitor is physically bigger than the other (most newer monitors are a minimum 19 inches diagonal where a few years ago most were 17 inches or less) than at an equivalent pixel resolution the bigger monitor will have bigger pixels - thus anything displayed will appear equivalently "bigger".

More about pixels:

Everything you see displayed on your monitor is made of tiny little blocks called "pixels", arranged in a rectangular grid. The 1905FP display has just over 1.3 million of these pixels, arranged in 1280 columns of 1024 pixels (1280 x 1024 =1,310,720). Each pixel is controlled independently by the video processor, and can at any time be any one of some 16.7 million different colors. All 1.3+ million pixels are physically redrawn every 60 seconds (each pixel can change color 60 times each second - as long as the graphics processor is fast enough to direct such changes).

If you have a "1 Mega-Pixel" camera, you can display the full (approx.) 1 million pixels of data in each photo you take on your monitor, and have room left over. I use an (approx.) 6 mega-pixel camera, and cannot view an entire image from this camera onscreen at one time at full quality - there're about 4.7 million more pixels in the image than on my display.

If you want to reduce the size of your icons you can select a smaller icon size (which will use fewer pixels to represent each icon). You can also select smaller font sizes. Or, you can use the native 1280x1024 resolution and instruct the computer to use LARGE font sizes and LARGER icons (so they don't appear to small for you). Both options will just use more pixels to draw the respective items.