Tips & Tricks

Building a Better Desktop Through Higher Resolutions!

Ah, the humble graphics card. Nestled deep in the heart of your computer, it quietly weaves pictures of light at thirty frames per second, all to keep you happily viewing your desktop or document or web page.

Would you like to get the most out of that fancy graphics card you’ve got? You may have tried ‘maxing-out’ your screen resolution when you first got the new system, but found to your dismay that at higher resolutions everything is too small to see.

Well, guess what? You can change all that! And you should!

WHY?

Resolution is generally specified as two numbers for a monitor. Something like “800 x 600” or “640 x 480.” Those numbers indicate how many pixels fit on the screen (horizontally x vertically). The more pixels you can fit, the more information you can display at once.

By default, when you increase the resolution in Windows, the system will simply squish everything up into the corner of the screen leaving you a lot more blank space to work with. For some people, that’s the greatest thing since pizza-flavored bagels (yum!).

However, if you like the size of your icons and text, you can tell Windows to use the extra space to display things in greater detail. This has a similar effect to increasing the dpi (dots per inch) on your printer from 150 to 300. The images are the same size, but since they are drawn with more, smaller dots, they look better.

HOW?

In this tutorial, we’re going to do three things:

First, we’ll check your screen resolution and see about bumping it up.
Second, we’ll adjust your desktop to match.
Third, we’ll increase the default font size in Internet Explorer so web pages look good.

Ready? Keep your arms in, and have a fun ride!

1. SCREEN RESOLUTION

Right-click on your desktop and select Properties. This will bring up the Display Properties window.

1. Select the Settings tab.
2. Under Colors, make sure you’re set to High Color (16 bit). Higher settings may be available, but unless you’re doing advanced image processing, you can’t generally see the difference, and higher settings just slow down your system.
3. Then slide the Screen Area bar to at least 1024 x 768. If you can go higher, try moving it all the way up! Click on Apply and see the difference! If there are no technical problems, you can just click OK and move on to the next step.

(If you get a weird flickery screen or static or something strange like that, just sit tight – the system will reset itself to your old screen mode in fifteen seconds. You might want to reinstall your drivers if there are problems here or just pick a different resolution.)

2. DESKTOP SETTINGS

With your new, higher screen resolution, you may notice that your icons seem a little smaller, and maybe that cool wallpaper picture you had doesn’t look quite as cool as it did. Let’s fix those!

Right-click on the desktop and open up the Display Properties window.

1. Click on the Appearance tab. This brings up one of the most powerful customization features in Windows. (Ooh!)
2. Click on the words Message Box in the sample window. Note the new options that appear in the bottom of the window.
3. Increase the font size until you can read the sample text comfortably.
4. Repeat this process for each element in the sample window that you’d like to enlarge.
5. While you’re at it, you can pick colors that match your wallpaper, if you’re the sort of person who can pick matching colors. (Hey, I sure can’t!) Once you’re happy with the changes you’ve made there, you’ll want to check out the Large Icons option available under the Effects tab. I prefer the normal icons, even on my highest resolution setting, but the choice is yours.

3. INTERNET EXPLORER DEFAULT FONT SIZES

Once you have your desktop and system settings the way you want them, you just need to configure your applications. Most will use the settings you chose in step two, but Internet Explorer has its own font system.

In Internet Explorer, open the View menu and go down to Text Size. Experiment with the different default sizes to see what works best for the sites you like to visit.

Many web pages set their fonts relative to whatever size you have picked in this menu, so some sites may require bigger or smaller settings. In general, though, the bigger your fonts are the better they will look. (Especially if you have enabled font-smoothing! See the 06/26/02 Newsletter for details on how to do this.)

For other programs, look for zoom options (Microsoft Word, for instance, will let you specify the default zoom) in the View or Display menus.

WHEW!

Got all that? I know there are a lot of steps, but once you’ve changed your screen resolution and learned how to work with the display properties, you will then truly own your desktop.

Now go impress your friends!

--Tom Dalton

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