Ever since I got this (widescreen, ~15.6 inch) laptop I’ve been frustrated as hell that the native resolution (1920 x 1080) makes everything so absurdly tiny that squinting to click on buttons is damn near impossible, but the next stop down that actually takes advantage of the monitor’s full display screen is 1280 x 720; a really substantial drop. Every stop between that puts hideous black bars on the side of the screen because the aspect ratio is wrong.
For whatever reason today I got fed up enough to do some research and found out that indeed, I could define a custom resolution through my graphics card’s control panel. I’m now happily buzzing along at 1400 x 787 (I may tweak it further but this looks a lot better to me). The ability to set a custom resolution was under my nose this whole time but I just now figured out that I could do it.
When’s the last time you had a moment like that where you realized something you have been doing forever could be done so much better, and you never looked back once you changed your ways? I had a similar feeling when I switched from Hotmail to Gmail; a bit behind the curve.
Changing the native resolution of an LCD monitor is not the best option. Figure out how to change the DPI from 96 to 120.
You’ll get bigger text without simultaneously making everything look like shit. (This will be the 2nd moment where you’ve realized something you have been doing forever could be done so much better).
Err… I don’t know about that. I just tried changing the DPI setting (admittedly I didn’t know that was what was happening with those text settings of “large/medium/small” and that you could set a custom one as well), but it seems like it is only affecting windows icons and text (like text in the Windows menu and in title bars). But all the buttons in my applications are still absurdly miniscule, and somehow text actually looks worse.
I wasn’t seeing anything that seemed unnatural with the custom resolution - if it’s “not the best option” how would I test that to show something rendering poorly, for example?
Hmm… did a detailed comparison and note that while the custom resolution does cause some slight pixellation on some of the desktop icons, virtually everything else looks crisp and clear and 100 times better than it looks if I take the suggestion of keeping the native resolution and upping the DPI. (as noted, the latter option doesn’t seem to be affecting applications uniformly)