Coping with large monitors and high resolutions

High resolution means small icons and text, doesn't it? Not so, says David Dorn - not when you've read this, anyway!

Now that large monitors are relatively cheap, on-screen resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 are within most PC users' grasp, yet many folks whose kit can get up to these heady figures don't go there. The reason? Because, unless you know what you're doing icons, text and other screen furniture can be rendered as tiny-weeny and difficult to see.

Maybe that's down to the way the Display applet in Control Panel works, in that the Resolution slider (in all Windows versions) doesn't automatically lead to anything that changes the size of screen furniture.

Such a control does exist, though, and it's usually to be found under the Advanced button in the Settings tab of the Display control. Clicking on that button usually leads directly to it, in fact.

Variable

This is where things get somewhat vague, as each different graphics adapter can cause its own peculiar set of settings to be available in this section of the Display settings controls, so there's no one way to do things.

In general, though, the higher the Dots Per Inch setting, the larger your text, icons and other bits of on-screen furniture will become. So, changing the setting from Normal (96 DPI) to Large Size (120 DPI) will increase the size of things markedly, making them easier to read and identify. On most systems, there's also a Custom setting, the use of which can be extremely handy:

When you select this, a Ruler pops up, together with a settings drop-down. If you're wanting to display pages in your word processor that are exactly life-sized, you can hold a normal ruler (Imperial measurement only - none of these new-fangled centimetres) up to the screen and drag the on-screen ruler about until the measurements match. Very handy!

For a step-through guide, in pictures, click here - we'll bring you right back here when you've seen it.

Why?

No doubt you'll be wondering why it's worth going through all this palaver when, by selecting a lower resolution, everything gets bigger anyway.

It's simple - using a higher resolution and then selecting a higher DPI setting puts more on-screen dots (pixels) into every character, thus making them look sharper and getting rid of some of the jagged lines that make up every bit of screen furniture. So, you create a much sharper image on-screen than would otherwise be the case. Bear in mind that at 1600x1200, a real square inch of screen will hold four times the number of pixels that the same area in 800x600 would. Thus everything has to be sharper.

David Dorn