Viewsonic 1080p monitor w/8800GTX

[ezdriver]

My wife bought me a new monitor this week for my birthday after my trusty Viewsonic CRT finally died. She bought a Viewsonic VX2260wm 1080p LCD and it is SWEEEET! Drivers installed flawlessly on my WinXP system and, per Viewsonics recommendation, I set timing to 1920x1080@60Hz. My games now look great in widescreen.

However, I have one issue that I need to address: My taskbar is practically non-existent to the point that I can hardly view anything on it. Text viewed on my IE browser is also small but I can enlarge it to make things easier to view. My Outlook Express e-mail does not have an option to enlarge text. I have tried to lower the resolution to enlarge things on the desktop but the picture quality suffers badly.

My question is if there is a program that will allow me to alter the sizing of the taskbar and text in Outlook Express while keeping the 1080 resolution?

ez

 

[lavaheadache]

I think you should be able to hold your mouse over the thing you want bigger and press and hold control and scoll up using the mouse wheel.

 

[vj8usa]

You can up the DPI to make stuff more legible. In Vista, the setting's in the control panel (just type "dpi" in the control panel search and it'll come up). Or right click the desktop -> personalize -> adjust dpi (on the left side of the window).

 

[Leyawiin]

You have a resolution traditionally associated with 24" monitors on a 21.5" screen. You can up the font size by right clicking on the desktop and choosing the appearance tab and "large" or "extra large" font. That should take care of most of your issues. If it doesn't, you can also go into the "advanced" menu on the appearance tab and individually change the size of various items on Windows. As you've discovered you can change the text size within a browser as well. Just going to have to do some fiddling until you can see it without eye strain - similar to what you have to do with laptops.

 

[ezdriver]

Great. Thanks for the ideas and I'll give 'em a try when I get home from work.

ez

 

[Eureka]

Go with vj8usa's solution, changing the DPI tends to fix sizing issues.

 

[kylebisme]

DPI settings work good in some cases, but don't effect others, and mess up some things too.

If I were using such a monitor I'd try driver scaling and a slightly lower desktop resolution like 1760x990. The flat panel scaling and custom resolution options are in the Nvidia control panel.

 

[ezdriver]

I tried Leyawiin's solution which addresses a lot of the sizing issues. Thanks much to all for your input, though. As a aside, as I had stated in my original post, I did change the DPI but it resulted in less-thann-ideal results. I just decided to stick with the native 1080 setting and adjust from there.

ez