Custom Display Resolutions in XP

-
Having purchased a snazzy new 22" wide screen flat panel monitor and finding everything hunky dory in Windows Vista I tried the same monitor with a Windows XP machine only to find disappointment kicking down my door. When I went to Display Settings in Control Panel and dragged the Resolution slider up, the native resolution of the monitor was not there.

Now every flat panel monitor should be run at its native resolution in order to look its best - every "virtual" pixel maps to a real one (or actually a real triad of red, green, and blue) on the screen. The monitor wanted to run at 1680x1050 but my only options were along the lines of 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1080 and so on. This was disappointing because the text and images looked either squashed or stretched.

So what to do then? Well, the fix involved a little bit of registry hacking. The registry is essentially Windows' own internal database in which it keeps all its various settings. It's not usually supposed to be tweaked by humans but rather by Windows itself and if you get things wrong the results could be an un-bootable PC. Also, if you inadvertently set a resolution too high for your monitor you could damage it and/or your graphics card. So I obviously don't recommend doing any of this! You have been warned.

Important
Always back up your registry before tweaking it! The best way is probably to capture a System Restore point - Start Programs Accessories System Tools System Restore Create a restore point. If things go wrong you can always boot into Safe Mode (hit F8 at boot time) and choose "Restore my computer to an earlier time" in the System Restore utility.

So here we go
  1. Open RegEdit - Start Run and type "regedit"
  2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\VIDEO{the address of your primary video card...it often begins with "23A77BF7"}\0000
  3. The Default Settings.XResolution data value is the horizontal resolution, and the Default Settings.YResolution data value is the vertical.
  4. Double-click the Default Settings.XResolution data entry, select the Decimal radio button, and in the Value Data field, enter your desired horizontal resolution.
  5. Then do the same with Default Settings.YResolution to change the vertical resolution.
  6. Exit RegEdit and reboot your PC.
  7. You should now be able to choose the required resolution.

Note
If you're scared of tweaking your registry (and you probably should be!), there's a handy application on the web called PowerStrip which allows you similar resolution-changing functionality. However, although many on the web recommend it, I didn't find it to be of any help at all.

Comments

Petra said…
Thanks for your tip.
I had a problem with my new widescreen monitor that Windows XP stretched the height. But I solved the problem by changing the default yresolution to 640 (it was 1024 x 768 (4:3) on my old CRT) and matched the new 16:10 ratio and now it starts up correctly and changes to the default resolution to 1680 x 1050.
24 January 2009 at 21:05
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evolution MK-249C MIDI Keyboard Mac OS X Problem

-
Mac OS X generally seems capable of dealing with just about anything you can throw at it. However upon connecting my trusty Evolution MK-249C MIDI keyboard up to my 2nd generation MacBook it steadfastly refused to play ball. This keyboard has always been instantly recognised by Windows XP and so it was surprising to encounter this. The M-Audio website (M-Audio took over Evolution it appears) offered no real assistance. There was no driver available for Mac OS X 10.4.9 as the keyboard is supposed to be "Class Compliant" which apparently means it doesn't need one... strange. Eventually after consulting some forums I found the fix. The problem seems to be related to Mac OS on the Intel MacBooks. There is a patch on the M-Audio site but only for MacOS 10.1.5. This must be downloaded and installed. Here is the link: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.drivers&f=596 Upon restarting the OS the keyboard was recognised by Mac OS and GarageBand had no trouble
Read more

Using VoIP with SmoothWall

-
Image
I’ve been playing with SmoothWall Express (Polar) recently and am generally pretty impressed.  However, my Linksys SPA921 IP Phone hadn’t been working.  I decided to turn my attention to it today. The phone wouldn’t give a dial tone at all unless I used the “SIP Proxy” option in SmoothWall, however, that wouldn’t allow any outgoing calls.  I tried creating various exceptions in the firewall, even setting the phone to be an “always allowed machine”, all to no avail. Then I hit on the solution… I had a BT ADSL router connecting to the internet performing NAT, the SmoothWall connected to this performing NAT, and the IP Phone connecting to the SmoothWall as shown in the diagram below: SIP doesn’t appear to play nicely with this double-NAT arrangement.  So I changed the WAN configuration on my BT ADSL router to run in “Bridged” mode and then configured the “Red” (internet) interface on the SmoothWall to run in PPPoE mode.  This required configuring the BT broadband username and pa
Read more

McAfee does my head in

-
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: to all intents and purposes installing McAfee Anti-virus software is pretty much as bad as getting a virus.  There, I said it.  Again. I’ve lost count of how many problems I’ve had with customer PCs over the years where the root of the problem was McAfee in one or another of its hideous incarnations.  But here’s one that’s fresh in my head because I’ve only just sorted it out… A customer had a PC that wouldn’t connect to the iTunes Store in iTunes.  He could do everything else with iTunes, just not connect to the store.  Actually, now I think of it he probably wouldn’t have been able to use the internet radio stations in iTunes either.  He could access the internet and send/receive emails just fine.  iTunes just refused to play ball.  When I ran the Diagnostics in iTunes I got an error –3221. Well what could cause this?  Probably a firewall I thought.  The customer had McAfee Security Center with VirusScan and Personal Firewall.  They also
Read more