Need help adjust my LCD monitor?

T

twopu

New member
I just got a 19" Samsung 930B LCD monitor and I'm having a little bit of trouble adjusting it. I've had CRT monitors all my life so this is my first LCD and I'm having a few problems.



Screen resolution:



The manual says to set it at 1280 by 1024 pixels, but when I do that the text is really small and I wind up not using 2-4 inch of the screen when I'm online. I've tried adjusting the text size but it only works on certain sites or just parts of sites. I've tried all the resolutions and found that 1024 by 768 was the best compromise. My biggest problem with that resolution is that the text looks slightly faint and grainy.



Contrast, Brightness, Fine, Coarse, Sharpness, etc:



How do you guys have yours set? I would image it's like a tv in that it would be based on personal preference and there all different. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
 
Unfortunately, an LCD monitor (unlike CRT) only looks sharp at it's optimum resolution which is most likely the 1280x1024. As you have discovered, any other resolution will make the images, especially text, will look fuzzy. All the other adjustments will depend on your personal preference.



If you use Internet Explorer as your browser, the next verion is going to have a Zoom feature that will increase the size of the websites being displayed, so that might help when you're online. And, yes, I know Microsoft probably stole that feature from some other browser!
 
When is the new version of IE coming out?



I currently have my monitor hooked up through the analog signal because I don't have a graphics card to connect to the digital signal. Would it be worth the investment to get a new digial graphics card so that I can use the digital signal? Would that help with the grainy text?
 
Nope...like hooked mentioned, LCDs are built to run optimally at their max rated resolution. They're designed with pixel size in mind. Changing from analog to digital won't help much in this respect.
 
twopu said:
When is the new version of IE coming out?



I currently have my monitor hooked up through the analog signal because I don't have a graphics card to connect to the digital signal. Would it be worth the investment to get a new digial graphics card so that I can use the digital signal? Would that help with the grainy text?
Click to expand...



It's been available for some time now as a beta and very stable at beta 3 (current). All my computers and client computers are currently using beta 2 & 3 of IE7 available at:



www.microsoft.com/ie



Have some fun with it and it'll take a few days to get use to it
 
Great suggestions from everyone! I have IE7 running on a Virtual PC image to test it out. I didn't want to load it on my real machine in case it screwed something up. So far, I like it...especially being able to open new tabs in one browser window instead of opening up multiple browser windows.



OP, try out the Cleartype to see if that makes a difference. I always turn it on mine. Some people have complained that it actually makes the letters fuzzier, but I like it because it somehow adds a "shadow" or contrast between the text and the background so the text is supposed to look sharper.
 
Thanks for all the tips!!!



Anyone else use IE7? I just don't want to download it and have a problem or wind up not liking it and not being able to go back to the original IE.
 
One thing to note for you twopu, you can revert back to 6.x at anytime you wish by uninstalling it via XP's Add/Remove Section in Control Panel.



As for it "messing up" your system, considering I'm a Microsoft Beta Tester for Office 12 and Vista (gives you an indea of my standpoint), there's close to no way possible for it to "mess" up your computer in a good way to put it :). Internet browsers are always an easy upgrade and worth playing with. With a client at least every 3 days, there's no way in the world I would upgrade them to a beta of IE without knowing exactly how it's going to act (or else I'm going to get a lot of support calls....)



Cheers,

GMCloud
 
GMCloud,



How do you like Vista. I see you have the transparency turned on. Are you running it on a machine that can take advantage of all the graphics features? I tried loading it into Virtual PC but couldn't get the real benefit of the graphics since VPC uses such an outdated Video Card driver.



As for IE7, it takes getting used to not having the File, Edit, etc on top. I like the tabs a lot. I'm always going from my work network to home network. I wish there was a faster way to turn off the proxy server setting besides tools>conneciton>advanced...
 
Hooked,

(Man I feel bad hijacking this topic a little :()-Just a quick tip for you incase you didn't know, Pressing the Alt Button will allow you to show the hidden toolbar in IE (and in Vista's Explorer Windows) and you can also force the toolbar to appear perm. by the Tools Button under the search box.



Regarding Vista,

It's come a long, long, long way thankfully and it is now my primary OS on my laptop. The public beta was decent but the interim build was a dramatic improvement in overall preformance and stability. Vista is great for a lot of little things not to mention the overall graphics overhaul. UAP is a pain in the "neck" and I have it disabled on all builds. With only a few small bugs and not having 5.1 sound yet (thanks to Creative's poor support for beta drivers on the Audigy lines), it's very hard for me to go back to XP. It outpreforms XP in preformance however the memory drain is a bit more. 1 Gig of RAM is a minimum when I'm building computers for clients who plan on upgrading to Vista.



As for Aero, I'm running a ATI Mobility 9600PT which is an AGP graphics card on the default WDDM drivers. I've not had a problem yet on any of the graphics hardware I've tested it on and unless Aero Diamond (which is a big debate in itself) is released, any AGP/PCI Express card will be able to fully utlize Vista's Aero.



Hope that helps a little :)



~GMCloud
 
Please don't apologies, I'm learning a lot. To be honest I'm learning that I don't know much about computers. I don't know what a Virtual PC is or what Vista is. I'm going to have to find an idiots guide to computers. Please continue and hopefully I'll start understanding.



Oh, maybe I'm not use to having an LCD, but my eyes hurt a bit almost to the point where I can see myself getting a headache after working on it for hours. Will this go away or can I adjust anything? I've turned down the brightness but that doesn't seem to help.
 
Some people do have an adjustment period when switching from crt to lcd. I know people at work that keep their laptop resoultions low to keep the larger text and live with the fuzzy text. I don't keep my brightness/contrast at the highest setting so I don't burn a hole in my retinas.



Have you tried turning on the ClearType (as someone else suggested?) If you don't know how, let me know.



Also, Windows Vista is the next version of Windows. You are probably running Windows XP right now. Vista has many upgraded features to the underlying systems and graphics. This will put a strain on older machines with not a lot of memory and harddrive space. As I mentioned in my other posts, if you have an older graphics card, you will not be able to activate some of the newer graphics capabilities of Vista.



Virtual PC is a software that creates a software version of a pc on your own pc. It looks and acts like a physical machine, but it is all running in the Virtual PC software. It requires a lot of cpu, memory and harddrive space. But it comes in handy if you want to load something new but you don't want to risk screwing up your own machine. For instance, I've used VPC to install Windows Vista just to see how it works and I didn't have to try and find a spare PC to load it on. As I mentioned before, I loaded the Beta version of IE7 on a virtual image of Windows XP just in case I couldn't recover back to IE6 if I didn't like it or it didn't work.
 
Just a quick note for you twopu, I read through this topic again and was surprised that nobody has mentioned turning up the display DPI (dots per inch) from 90 dpi to 120 dpi. What this will do Twopu is increase the text size throughout windows to make it easier to read. Many manufacturers such as Dell use 120dpi for their laptops on default and let the user change it back down to windows default (90). Try giving this a shot and see what happens.



1.) Right-click on your desktop (the mainspace in windows that displays your icons and wallpaper) and select "Properties"



2.) Click on the "Settings" tab and then select the "Advanced" button.



3.) The default tab should be "General" which in this tabs shows a section labeled "Display" and a box that says 90 dpi. Select the drop down box and choose 120 dpi. Hit the "Apply" button at the bottom of the dialog. Windows may prompt you to insert your XP Installation CD if it cannot find the files needed. If they exist, it'll say something in the lines of "Would you like to skip recopying the files over via CD and use the existing ones" and hit yes. If this happens the dialog will close. Now reopen it via the Advanced button again and click on 90 dpi, then click on the box again and click 120 dpi and hit "Apply." This is a strange bug I noticed when doing this a few minutes ago on an XP SP2 machine and thought I'd mention it in detail for ya. You may then want to change your display resolution to its native size (probably 1280x1024) to clean up the picture.



Hope that may help a little! :)
 
Thanks for the tip GMCloud27. It worked on Office applications, unfortunately the text is still small when I'm online with a 1280 x 1024 resolution. I've tried changing the text size but only certain things enlarge. I'll keep trying
 
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