Wide Screen Monitor makes pictures look too wide?

Hi,
I posted last week that I was having trouble with my monitor that all the colors went to green and yellow. I ended up having to buy a new monitor so I'm sorry I did not get back here to thank those who replied.

The monitor that I bought is a wide screen Hpw2007 my computer is a Dell xpps 410 I am using windows XP.

The trouble im having is they want the display set too 1680 X 1050 and when I set the setting to this resolution I cant read the screen its way too small. Now if I don't set it to this all my images I download from my camera look too wide. Many pictures on websites as well look too wide. So wanted to know if anyone knows away around this?

Thanks bunches
Jill

PS? Why do I see floating text here that says if I can see if PM Major attitude yet if I try to PM him he has his PM's off? LOL! Is this an Aprils fools joke?

 

you could set it to native resolution and then increase your dpi settings to increase text size.

 

It would have been nice if he told you how to do that?
Right click a blank spot on your desktop and select properties then Settings and at the bottom click Advanced. You'll see a place where you can set the dpi higher than 96, use the default 120 or if thats too big use custom and set something your compfortable with.

There is another way but it involves some playing around. Once you play for a while though you will probably love it. Go back to where you saw Settings and this time select Appearance, then Advanced. I usually do this with the Classic Style of windows but in the Advanced section there is an ITEM drop down where you can choose all kinds of settings and colors for the windows and backgrounds. You can change the sizes of some things including desktop icons and their spacing as well. Some items have dual colors associalted with them so the background is one color and the text another. I used to do a sort of glow in the dark thing by selecting a greenish glow color with a darker background and when you hovered your mouse over a menu selection the different bars seemed to glow green. Once you fool around and you like what you see, you can save it as a custom setting, I used to have the glowing the dark and a orange creamsicle one and several different color schemes. Watch out for the bright intense colors, they can drive you insane.

 

Hi Appzalien
Thank you so much I just printed out your reply and will give it a try in the morning. I appreciated ibbonkers reply too but when I read it I said how the heck do I do that LOL! So you read my mind..

All in all thank you both very much!

Jill

 

Something I didn't mention about the appearance > advanced section is that the colors palet that shows when you select a items color box is not the greatest selection, but if you select basically what you want (say an orange) then hit the custom button you can customize orange to your specific need and even save colors that you have customized (although its a pain and often wants to overwrite your older saves, you have to select an empty box before you start playing then when you save it goes to the box you had selected). If you select the Windows Classic style before you go advanced you can try the glow in the dark effect simply by going to the "selected items" item in the drop down and set the 1st color to green then customize it to look a light ghostly yellow/green and finally set the second color (which is text) to black. Apply these settings and see what happens. you might also be able to do the same thing in the XP style I haven't tried it yet. I know I used to save these settings as a custom style but that may have been with win98 I don't see that choice here in XP.

OH, maybe its the Theme section where you can save your changes with its save as button. I thought for sure it was where the Color Scheme was under the Appearance tab. Changing your colors there is much safer and you can also use it to get back to the default scheme if you get carried away with your color changing. Its still a good idea to take some notes before you change things, especially sizes so you can always get back to the way it was.

 

I recently purchased a 20" widescreen LCD also, and when I first hooked it up, all my icons and images looked a bit 'warped' or 'stretched' also. I now have the resolution set at 1280 x 800 and it looks perfect.

 

All LCD Monitors have a Native Resolution and you should use that for the best possible picture from the monitor. Switching to 1200x800 is not the best way to fix things if 1200x800 is not your monitors native resolution. When your at the window where you change resolutions and color settings as you slide thru the resolution options you will see the picture of the monitor change shape. When its shaped like a wide screen monitor (long and short) it will display with less stretching on a wide screen monitor and when its more squarish it will display best on a 4x3 type monitor. All that aside you should find out what your native resolutuion is and set it there (most likely 1680 x 1050 or 1600 x 1200). Thats where all this problem started because that resolution is so fine a picture, and it shrinks everything (icons and windows) so small, that changing the dpi or custom fooling around helps solve the tiny icons problem.