Display Area is Smaller than Screen

[BobH]

So, darling daughter drops off the Dell Inspiron laptop that we bought her several years ago because she bought herself a new one. I've been setting it up for the wife. It required some cleaning both literally and figuratively.

The wife likes large type display. So, I set the CP Display Settings tab size to 1024 by 768. This caused the display area to shrink so that there are black areas on the left and right of the screen. I then went to the Desktop tab and set the position to Tile and to Center without stretching the display.

I don't know any other options to set. The OS is WinXP Media Center Edition.

Anyone know how to fix this?

[StuartR]

Is it the display area that has shrunk, or just the desktop background? In other words can you drag windows to the black areas of the screen near the edges?

[John Gray]

Have you got any information about what is the native resolution of the screen? It sounds to me that it is different from the 1024x768 to which you set it. Alternatively, can you supply the model number, so this setting could be looked up, please?

[stuck]

I think John is right, by setting the display to 1024x768 you have applied a resolution that does not match the native resolution of the display.

I suggest you reset the desktop to what ever it was before and then make things easier to read by using 'extra large fonts'. I haven't got XP MCE in front of me at the moment so someone else will have to give you the exact location but the settings you need are also in the Display Properties dialog but not on tab that sets the desktop size, one of the other tabs.

Ken

[BobH]

Thanks for the responses, guys!

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron E1505 running the OS shipped on it. I cannot get anything to display in the black areas on each side of the screen. It is as if the 1024 pixel width is not wide enough for the hardware. If I make the Display Setting a higher value, the Stretch or Tile option will increase the display width and fill the screen.

I've never seen a monitor that wouldn't fill the screen regardless of the resolution settings (until this one). I haven't had a chance to look at it today.

Thanks again for the responses.

[John Gray]

Bob, I think you are confusing two things: screen resolution, and the desktop background. The screen resolution is what you need to be working on, to start with. To my surprise it would seem that the native resolution of at least one of the screen types fitted to the Inspiron E1505 is 1680x1050, so see if you can try this wide-screen resolution.

There is also a (subsidiary) suggestion that you should change the Dots Per Inch (dpi) setting to 96 if it is currently set to 120 - this comes from clicking on the Advanced button at the bottom right of the Display Settings screen you are working with. But see if you can sort out the screen resolution first!

[BobH]

Hello John!

Thank you for the information. I checked using Piriform Speccy and found that the monitor on this laptop does have 1680x1050 as native resolution. I changed the screen resolution to this setting and the full hardware width is now being used for display. I also found that the dpi was indeed set to 120 and I changed it back to 96. Now, however, the type size displayed as I type this appears to be about as small as 6pt printed type would be. Is there any setting that will increase the size of what is displayed without affecting the efficiency of utiliz(s)ation of the monitor space? I think I'm having an extreme attack of senioritis.

[HansV]

Try setting the dpi back to 120. This won't affect screen resolution but make text a bit larger.

[BobH]

Thank you, Hans!

This problem is now resolved. I tried all the settings in CP that I could find and did a lot of googling all to no avail. Finally, I checked the settings in Thunderbird and in Firefox and increased the font size in each application. That made the displayed characters large enough.

As I said in an earlier post, setting the CP Display/Settings/Screen_Resolution to 1680x1050 resolved the issue of the display image not filling the screen.

Thank you, all, for the suggestions and help.

[StoneChucker]

You may be able to find a setting in the BIOS to allow the display to stretch a 1024x768 resolution, to the full screen size. I've seen this in IBM Thinkpads of the late 90s, and early 00s. I haven't seen this recently.

[John Gray]

Try setting the dpi back to 120. This won't affect screen resolution but make text a bit larger.

Err, surely fewer dots per inch would make the text and graphics larger?

[John Gray]

You may be able to find a setting in the BIOS to allow the display to stretch a 1024x768 resolution, to the full screen size. I've seen this in IBM Thinkpads of the late 90s, and early 00s. I haven't seen this recently.

Since this is a 16:10 wide-screen, surely (if it were possible) this would cause significant horizontal stretching distortion? (1.6 to 1 for this wide-screen as opposed to 1.33 to 1 for the old laptops).

[HansV]

I must admit that I've never understood the dpi terminology as applied to display settings. A higher dpi display setting does result in larger text, although this seems illogical.

Fortunately, Windows 7 doesn't mention dpi any more, and uses a more logical terminology:

x106.png

The three settings correspond to 96 dpi, 120 dpi and 144 dpi, respectively.

[StuartR]

I must admit that I've never understood the dpi terminology as applied to display settings...

I suspect the dpi setting is being used to convert text size (in points) to number of screen pixels.

There are 72 points per inch
Assume 36 point text, which should be 1/2 inch tall
If the screen is set to 120 dpi then this character will be created at 60 pixels height
If the screen is set to 96 dpi then this character will be created at 48 pixels height

So the dpi setting is telling Windows what assumption to make, not changing the actual number of dots per inch on the screen.

[HansV]

Stuart, you're no doubt correct, but I still find it counterintuitive.

[Carol W.]

Regarding the original issue:

This caused the display area to shrink so that there are black areas on the left and right of the screen.

Whenever this happens to me, I change the refresh rate (found on the Monitor tab in Control Panel | Display | Screen Resolution | Advanced Settings), the screen goes black for a few seconds and the black borders disappear.

FWIW