Fuzzy graphics on Dell laptop LCD

[gramboh]

Hello there and Merry Christmas,

I'm at home right now for the holidays using my father's Dell Inspiron 5160 laptop (P4 3.06, 512meg, GeForce Go5200 64meg 4X AGP, 15inch LCD running at native 1400x1050 resolution 32bpp).

Ever since he received this machine a few months ago, I've noticed that while text (with cleartype on) and control panel icons etc. appear perfectly, graphics such as the icons in the system tray/quick launch menu and especially graphics on websites such as the Anandtech logo and motherboard/cpu/Linux etc icons on the main site are very fuzzy and hard to discern (both the graphic and the text in this case).

I've tried running at non-standard resolutions but the problem persists.

Has anyone experienced this with a laptop/LCD monitor? I'm considering putting the most recent Nvidia drivers on but as I am leaving tomorrow I don't want to ah heck anything up if there is a more obvious solution.

Thanks!

Edit: I'm trying to attach an image to show what I mean but I can't remember my webhost password offhand.

 

[Jeffyboy]

should it be about 1440? instead of 1400? Just seems like an odd resolution... not sure off-hand...post a pic if u can ;-)

 

[Pete]

You don't have Large Icons enabled somewhere, do you? Or maybe some AOL "web accelerator" is forcing low-res images?

A screenshot would help.

 

[gramboh]

Whoops, Dell had Large DPI (125) enabled by default, changed to normal and it is fine. Although now I worry my dad might have trouble reading text such as the URL in IE at this resolution (yep it is 1400x1050 I just checked).

Thanks for the help.

 

[Pete]

In that case, maybe muck around in the Display Properties>Appearance tab to increase the system font size. Or just increase the font size in the browser (View menu), tho that'll just affect the web page fonts (not the URL bar), and possibly not all the time (depending on how the page was coded, I think).

I can understand the systray icons becoming larger and blurrier, but I'm curious why website images were also resized.