Display problem- in desperate need of help!

[zubin]

Hello:

I am having trouble with my IBM Thinkpad T30.

I am currently running a resolution of 1400X1050 pixels.

When I change my resolution, instead of the desktop filling the screen, it occupies less of the screen (For example if I change the settings to 800 X 600) the desktop only occupies the middle third of my lcd screen and it is impossible to me to move the mouse outside this area.

Also when the computer starts up or I open my bios settings the visable and usable area of the LCD is reduced to abou ~1/3 the screen.

Anyone have any ideas? Can anyone help?

[fredstev]

The one time I saw this occur (not on a thinkpad, though) it took a video driver update to fix the problem. Windows was using a generic video driver because the correct one was corrupt. The owner did a driver rollback, and the only thing to rollback to was the generic driver.

[egibbs]

It's working as designed - by default it displays one screen pixel per video card pixel, so if you set the resolution to less than the screen resolution then you use less than the full screen.

You can turn on screen expansion which will stretch the display to fit the screen (It's either in the desktop properties or BIOS, I forget), but be warned that it will look like crap - crummy fonts, jaggies, etc. The best results will be if you set the resolution to exactly half the display resolution, because then it will just use 2 screen pixels per video pixel, but even that will look lousy.

Ed Gibbs

[betabill]

Native resolution always produces the best detail on a notepad screen.

[schen]

I went through this whole issue at previous job with a major university. LCDs had finally gotten down in price to the point where I could replace CRTs with that years order. Everyone was excited as this series of machines began to roll out. That's when the trouble started! As a matter of course, I had my staff set all screens to their native resolutions when the PCs were set up for the users. Then we started to get complaints that these new LCD monitors were displaying everything fuzzy. Pretty quickly we realized that we were having trouble largely with one group of users; middle-aged (mostly men) who were setting their resolutions to what they had aways used. 800x600 or 1024x768! This is virtually intolerable on a 17" or 19" LCD. In the ensuing battle; we get complaints, my techs would reset the resolution thinking it was fixed, the user would reset the resolution and complain.

We ended up having to make a compomise after we sat with the user and educated them. We set the resolution to native and bumped up the font size. I don't know how relevent that is to your problem, but it's at least an interesting story.