Hi I am Roger DeReu and my website is freecomputerconsultant.com. What I wanted to talk about today in this screencast is more about screen resolution in Windows Xp. I took my last video on how to change your screen resolution. I have had quite a few follow-up questions; one in particular, a person wants to know how to select a specific screen resolution that I think was like 1600 by 1050 or something like that which is a wide screen resolution.
Now to get to our screen resolution, the easiest way is to just pick an open area at the Desktop, right click, select Properties and then choose the Settings tab up here.
Now first of all, you can see that the display here, the —Operating System knows that I have the SyncMaster 950 from Samsung. I have a RADEON 7500 Family Video Card. If it is says something else here like maybe you know, Generic Video Card or plug and play monitor on this is kind of Generic Video Card, this is not the specific one to your machine, then you are not going to get the screen resolutions and options that you arelly should have available to you. But one other important point is on this Advanced button here and if you select the Monitor tab, you can see again, the monitor type does not say plug and play or does not say unknown monitor or unknown device, it tells me exactly what monitor I have. So it knows what this monitor is capable off.
And there different refresh rates, I choose something, usually 70 or above or the CRT which is what this is not a Flat Panel because with 60, it will get some kind of blinking that—mirror may no be discernable to some people but it is kind of annoying to those it is but this little check box right below is rather important, it says, Hide modes that monitor can not display.
Now typically, I like to leave that check because if you uncheck it, you will get a lot more options back here under the screen resolution but they probably won’t work. And you w ill—like we’re just going black screen and hopefully after either pressing the Esc key or a 15 second time out, Windows will return you to what you had.
But the other thing I want to make note is the type of monitor you have, if it is a wide screen monitor or a standard, more square-ish monitor and in the non wide screen. You typically have monitors where the screen resolution or the size is an either a 4:3 ratio or a 5:4 ratio. And you can see what 1280 by 1024, that is a 5:4 ratio, you can also choose something like a you know, maybe this standard 1024 by 768, that is a 4:3 ratio.
Things will look a little bit different on the same monitor that way and actually if you check out the monitor that you have, you know maybe in the website or read on the box, it came in—it will probably tell you what the ideal screen resolution is for that monitor and a lot of times, you want to pick that but with these older CRTs, this is a rather large CRT, it had a lot of options and you can pick a lot of different resolutions for it depending what you want to do.
But you can check that out. You just go to your Start button here, click Run and type in calc for the Calculator and you can just do a little bit of division here to find out what you actually have. For instance, 1024 divided by 768 is 1.3, well that is a 4:3 ratio and I know that because 4 divided by 3 is 1.33.
Now, if you look at some of the other options here and you need to put to say a—you can kind of tell by looking at the blue box or then number one whether it is wide screen or whether it’s not and you see 1280 by 768 is wide screen. I will double check that. Since this isn’t a wide screen monitor, really do not want to do that.
And it show us 1.66. So that is actually the 16:9 ratio which you probably will recognize this wide screen. But for this monitor and for what I am doing, typically the 1024 by 768, the 1280 by 1024 is pretty comfortable, so we leave it as that.
There you have it. Hope this gives you a little bit more information about changing the resolution on your monitor and choosing what is appropriate for what you are currently working with and the other, check that out, you know wide screen versus the 4 by 3 or the 5 to 4.
Please go to my website www.freecomputerconsultant.com. I have got other videos, articles, a lot tips and tricks, free newsletter you can sign up for and I hope you will watch again. Thank you for watching this video.
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