Section 4.8. Monitor Settings: All Versions | Windows Vista: The Missing Manual

4.8. Monitor Settings: All Versions

You wouldn't get much work done without a screen on your computer. It follows , then, that you can get more work done if you tinker with your screen's settings to make it more appropriate to your tastes and workload. And boy, are there a lot of settings to tinker with.

You can find them by right-clicking the desktop; from the shortcut menu, choose Personalize. In the resulting dialog box, click Display Settings. The window shown in Figure 4-8 appears.

Figure 4-8. All desktop screens today, and even most laptop screens, can make the screen picture larger or smaller, thus accommodating different kinds of work. Conducting this magnification or reduction entails switching among different resolutions (the number of dots that compose the screen) .

4.8.1. Resolution

The Resolution slider snaps to the various possible resolution settings that your monitor's software driver makes available: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 800, and so on.

When using a low-resolution setting, such as 640 x 480, the size of the pixels (dots) that constitute your screen image increase, thus enlarging the picturebut showing a smaller slice of the page. This setting is ideal, for example, when playing some small-window Web movie, making it fill more of the screen.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Blurry Flat-Panel Screens

Yucko! I tried the 800 x 600 setting on my laptop, and everything got all blurry and fuzzy! How do I fix it?

On any flat-panel screennot just laptop screensonly one resolution setting looks really great: the maximum one. That's what geeks call the native resolution of that screen.

At lower resolutions, the PC does what it can to blur together adjacent pixels, but the effect is fuzzy and unsatisfying. (On a traditional bulky monitor, the electron gun can actually make the pixels larger or smaller, but on flat-panel screens, every pixel is a fixed size.)

At higher resolutions (such as 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768), the pixels decrease, reducing the size of your windows and icons, but showing more overall area. Use this kind of setting when you want to see as much screen area as possible: when working on two-page spreads in a page-layout program, for example.

4.8.2. Colors

Today's monitors offer different color depth settings, each of which permits the screen to display a different number of colors simultaneously . This pop-up menu varies by video driver, but generally offers settings such as Medium (16-bit), which was called High Color in previous versions of Windows; High (24-bit), once known as True Color; and Highest (32-bit).

In the early days of computing, higher color settings required a sacrifice in speed. Today, however, there's very little downside to leaving your screen at its highest setting. Photos, in particular, look best when you set your monitor to higher-quality settings.

The Low (8-bit) optionif you even have itmakes photos look blotchy. It displays only 256 colors on the screen, and is therefore useful only for certain computer games that, having been designed to run on ancient PCs, require the lower color setting. (In that case, you shouldn't set your whole system to 256 colors just to run these older games . Instead, you should use the new compatibility mode described on page 236.)

4.8.3. Multiple Monitors

If your PC has two or more graphics cards, one graphics card with multiple connections, or a standard laptop video-out connector, you can hook up a second monitor or a projector. You can either display the same picture on both screens (which is what you'd want if your laptop were projecting slides for an audience), or create a gigantic virtual desktop, moving icons or toolbars from one monitor to another (Figure 4-9). The latter setup also lets you keep an eye on Web activity on one monitor while you edit data on another. It's a glorious arrangement, even if it does make the occasional family member think you've gone off the deep end with your PC obsession .

Figure 4-9. When you have multiple monitors, the controls on the Settings tab change; you now see individual icons for each monitor. When you click a screen icon, the settings in the dialog box change to reflect its resolution, color quality, and so on .

To bring about that extended-desktop scenario, click the icon that represents screen 2 (the external one), and then turn on "Extend the desktop onto this monitor." (If you can't figure out which screen is screen 2, click the Identify Monitors button in the upper-right corner.)

Tip: Plugging in a projector generally inspires Windows to present a clean, simple dialog box that asks a simple question: Where do you want to send your screen image? To the PC's screen, to the projector, or to both?This is an extremely thoughtful touch for laptop luggers, because it avoids the staggeringly confusing keyboard-based system you previously had to use. That's where you'd press, for example, F8 three times to cycle among the three modes: image on laptop only (projector dark), image on projector only (laptop screen dark), or image on both at once. Vista's method is much easier.

4.8.4. Advanced settings

If you click the Advanced button on the Settings tab, you're offered a collection of technical settings for your particular monitor model. Depending on your video driver, there may be tab controls here that adjust the refresh rate to eliminate flicker, install an updated adapter or monitor driver, and so on. In general, you'll rarely need to adjust these controlsexcept on the advice of a consultant or help-line technician.