laptop resolutions

[neit]

hi all,

My friend has an inspiron 8000 and is having some trouble running half life and counter strike. The laptop came w/ win ME and it would interpolate the 640 x 480 to fit his screen just fine (well, i thought it was ugly, but it worked fine).

He sent in for the dell win xp home upgrade and also got a bios upgrade. Since he installed those, his games don't fill up the screen. I've searched around and it says to try to find a bios setting, but none looked like they would do it. I then looked through video settings for his video card, but i couldn't seem to find anything there either.

He is using the ati mobile chipset with his inspiron.



PS i posted this mainly b/c i couldnt' find any solutions that addressed why it would work before the upgrade but not after, this seems to be the baffling point for me.

 

[corkyg]

Why not revert to the older BIOS and OS that worked? Consider dual boot also.

Laptops have LCDs - and LCDs have a fixed array of pixels. That is known as the "native resolution." Anything less than that has to be interpolated by adding pixels together -resulting in larger rectangles of fewer synthesized pixels. That means jaggies and artefacts.

Laptops are not intended for use with legacy games that require such low resolution. So, you have to make do with what works.

Have you thought of an external CRT monitor? They can be connected to a laptop and can do many resolutions the old fashioned scanning way.

 

[neit]

the external crt isn't an option really =(

I think the bios upgrade was required to fix something before installing xp, i was thinking of shooting this one off to dell, but i don't know why it would stop interpolating pixels after the upgrades, the bios doesn't have a video setting i can play around with (or i didn't find one when i was looking around in there) and i figured if ME would do the pixel interpolation, then xp shouldn't be much different.

 

[Escalade]

The BIOS update probably removed that option. I?ve had laptops in the past that had an option to expand 640x480 (or 800x600) to fill the screen... it?s a BIOS setting and not within Windows.

You might also want to try Dell's tech support, see if they have any suggestions.

 

[Escalade]

<< ...i couldnt' find any solutions that addressed why it would work before the upgrade but not after, this seems to be the baffling point for me. >>


Let's see...

1) Working
2) Upgrade
3) Not Working

No. Not baffling at all for me! What's that saying? If it ain't broke don't fix it!

 

[neit]

hehe, i know how that is, i learned my lesson on my own when i played the upgrade game on my machine,

he upgraded the bios b/c when dell sent him his xp home cd, they sent him the bios upgrade too, not too into hardware, my friend just upgraded it (which i would have probably done, until now that i know that they can disable the fill screen setting). I guess i'll have to have him send over a message to dell tech.

 

[fr]

Press Fn+F7 or Fn+F8. That should fix it.

 

[Zenmervolt]

On my ThinkPad, there is an option under Start --> Settings --> Control Panel --> Display --> Settings --> Advanced --> Displays --> Panel --> Scale Image To Panel Size. The drivers for the ATI card used in my ThinkPad will let you fiddle with that option. Yes, it's burried, but it's there. Hope your friend's computer has a similar option. If not, try updating the video drivers to the most recent drivers available.

ZV