The budget fairy smiled on my workgroup and shipped us brand new Dell 2208WFP widescreen monitors.
The protective overlay on the screen claims the native resolution is 1680 x 1050. I had to update the video drivers to have that as an option. Pre-update, 1280x1024 was the max. After a reboot, 1680x1050 is the pre-selected option as Plug and Play did its thing, and the monitor is listed by name, rather than “Generic Monitor”
All’s peachy? Nope. My Windows desktop is significantly larger than the screen, so I have to pan around to find the edges. Blech! If I go to the next lower resolution - 1280x1080, everything fits with no panning, but everything’s also stretched horribly.
What do I need to do to make Windows display things properly at the native resulotion without panning?
System is an IBM Thinkpad, running Win XP, ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics. Primary monitor is the Dell 2208WFP, connected by DVI, secondary monitor is a Dell 1908FP, connected by analog VGA. The aspect ratio stretching is unaffected by whether or not I’m running two monitors or not, and I’ve tried a handful of reboots just to make sure everything was settled in.
I see this at work with the older thinkpads and it is video card issue (it’s not powerful enough). We’ve actually found the opposite from what What Exit is suggesting, the cards work better on VGA than DVI.
The latest official drivers won’t solve the problem.
The reason 1280x1024 looked distorted is that it is normal (4:3) aspect ratio while the monitor itself is a widescreen (8:5) monitor. If you choose a widescreen aspect ratio, everything should look better (sorry I can’t think of the next lower widescreen aspect ratio at the moment). Any aspect ratio where first number divided by the second = 1.6 should appear to be normal.
I did chose a widescreen ratio, or more specifically, I selected the panel’s native resolution. Everything should be hunky-dunky at the native resolution, no? But that’s when I ran into the panning mess. 1280x1024 is simply the next lower offered resolution. No panning, but a stretched image.
If the display says its native resolution is 1680 x 1050, and Windows says it’s putting out the same, shouldn’t I be able to get a nice image with circles that are actually round, and no panning needed?
It’s sounding like the built-in video card is the problem. Short of something “mysteriously” happening to the laptop and the thing being replaced, what options are there? Are any of those USB video adapters up to the task of driving this panel?
I’ve checked and you should be able to get it to look OK using 1280x800 (everything will be bigger).
When you use a resolution smaller than the native resolution, each pixel is stretched over multiple physical pixels. 1280x1024 isn’t proportional to the monitor shape, so there is more stretching on the horizontal than on the vertical.
If the video card isn’t powerful enough to run the desired resolution properly, it won’t. I suspect that the difference I’ve seen in the past is due to differences between the VGA and DVI protocols.
Windows can’t differentiate between aspect ratios that the monitor can display and aspect ratios that the monitor can display well. As far as I have been able to tell, drivers for LCD monitor amount to saying:
These are the resolutions that the monitor can display (not necessarily in a visually pleasing way)
These are the refresh rates that the monitor can display
Two options that I can think of:
swap the new monitor to the VGA port to see if it has the same problem there (we did this at work and it solved the problem in most cases).
goto the lenovo website and get the latest drivers for your laptop (who knows it might work)
set the resolution to 1280x800 (should be the correct aspect ratio)
I have no experience with USB video adapters, so I can’t comment on them.
Try poking around in the menu settings on the monitor itself. There may be settings relating to HDTV stuff (expand the picture to make other aspect ratios fill the screen and such) that need to be changed for the computer monitor application.
Swapping the VGA vs DVI cables did the trick. (almost!)
The new monitor is now running 1680x1050 with no stretching or panning on that bog-standard VGA input that’s been around for decades. The only snag is that the laptop considers the DVI output as the primary monitor, so Windows boots on the smaller monitor.
I’d been hoping to use the smaller monitor as the secondary to park things like Active Directory and mainframe sessions, but having the proper resolution and aspect ratio is more important.
Strangely, the laptop displays on the secondary monitor at boot, and the first black Windows screen with the KITT scanner thing is also on the secondary monitor, but the Windows login appears on the primary screen. I’m sure this flip-flop makes sense to some engineer somewhere. If I get a chance, I might poke around in the BIOS to see if there’s a way to make the VGA output be the primary display.
By the way, once you feed it the right signal, this 22" monitor is really nice! Not even expensive - I was surprised to see how much the prices have dropped.
Cool, I am glad it worked. In my experience, on newer cards, it is usually the DVI that works and the VGA that acts up.
Sometimes you can swap primary monitors. I depends on the video card again and is part of the display properties. It might be worth experimenting with as I have had some success along these lines.
I recently bought a 24" wide screen for my PC at home and it was only $300 plus Shipping. I love it, but I need to upgrade my old VGA only card to an inexpensive 512mb DVI card before it worked correctly.
I’m glad too! I’d hate to have to call the boss and say “Thanks for the monitors, but…”
A co-worker has a T-60 Thinkpad, (Mine’s a T-42) and for her, the installation was truly plug and play - the big monitor came up automaticall as the primary at the native wide resolution. No driver installations, no finagling with cables. I envy her.
Now I just have to get used to all this desktop space! I’m really not accustomed to having to actually turn my head to see everything.
I had to go into the laptop’s BIOS to have it enumerate the built-in AGP adapter before the PCI adapter that’s part of the dock, and juggle the ordering of the displays in a process akin to setting boot order for drives.
If I was using two regular 4:3 ratio panels, the multi-monitor setup probably would have been completely painless.
All in all, it took new drivers, diddling with the BIOS, much cable-swapping and more reboots than I can remember to make it work. Worth it though!
Just watch… The budget fairy will bestow a new laptop on me five weeks from now, making all of this moot, and just to punish me for having a learning experience. :smack:
I’m really not accustomed to having to actually turn my head to see everything.