tiny display and icons

Hi, Heather
I bought a Sony laptop in about 2001. The screen's native resolution was
1024 by 768. Changing the display to a lower resolution, like 800 by 600
just used up a 800 by 600 section in the center of the screen. The display
adapter and driver did not know how to interpolate, so 800 by 600 could not
be stretched to fill the screen.

I think your partner's laptop is newer and probably does have the ability to
interpolate a wide variety of display resolutions to fill the screen. The
display will be sharpest in the native resolution and will be somewhat fuzzy
(due to the interpolation) in any other resolution, and must be 'stretched'
in one dimension or the other in order to fill the screen.

Perhaps the 'pathetically tiny'ness is caused by the tinyness of the screen.
In the same price range, normal and wide screen laptops typically are the
same width. The wide screen laptop screen's height is less than the normal
screen laptop's height. Measure the height and width of the screen and
calculate the size of each pixel based on the native resolution. Do a
similar calculation for other laptop screens on whose screens the icons are
not so 'pathetically tiny'. I think you will find that this widescreen
laptop's pixels are about 80% as high and wide as a normal laptop's pixels,
making the area of each pixel about 64% of the area of a normap laptops
pixel. So the characters will be pathetically tiny.

-Paul Randall

"heather" <heather.RemoveThis@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BAA9393F-8229-4CC5-B58C-8FE4445BC731@microsoft.com...
> Hi; this problem is driving me nuts; perhaps someone can help me? My
> partner
> has a Dell laptop, with a widescreen, running XP (SP2). It has
> pathetically
> tiny icons and all the displays are either little teeny centered or else
> on
> the left of the screen (on IE and Windows apps). Changing the display
> settings only makes the screen fuzzy, and also then centres the whole
> window,
> so there are black lines to the side. Changing the dpi doesnt help either
> (fuzzy).