The ever shrinking pixel
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Where do you find those monitors? The resolution tends to go DOWN for new monitors (well, at least the cheap ones). For example, all 22" monitors seem to use a resolution of 1.680 x 1.050. That's only 90 DPI! I've seen 17" monitors that had a better resolution - but those seem to have disappeared now. Apparently the manufacturers think the main use of a computer is watching videos - the monitors are getting bigger, even wider (I'm seeing more and more 16:9 PC monitors), but the resolution is shrinking. Unfortunately, if you DO have a good monitor, you'll have to deal either with too small display elements, or with apps that break when you change the DPI setting in Windows. It's a bit better with Vista though, there the desktop manager can scale up application windows as bitmaps. That doesn't look nice, but it's better than the alternatives (having tiny buttons or buttons that are unreachable because the layout is messed up on high DPI settings).
Daniel Grunwald wrote:
Where do you find those monitors? The resolution tends to go DOWN for new monitors (well, at least the cheap ones). For example, all 22" monitors seem to use a resolution of 1.680 x 1.050. That's only 90 DPI! I've seen 17" monitors that had a better resolution - but those seem to have disappeared now.
Todd Smith
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I think mouse coordination skills factor in as well. I set my mouse speed next to the maximum speed and I'm not having any problems on my 1920 × 1200 screen.
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Lee, Gun-Woon wrote:
I think mouse coordination skills factor in as well. I set my mouse speed next to the maximum speed and I'm not having any problems on my 1920 × 1200 screen.
What kind of mouse? I'm beginning to think there's a big difference in behavior when it comes to mice.
Todd Smith
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Lee, Gun-Woon wrote:
I think mouse coordination skills factor in as well. I set my mouse speed next to the maximum speed and I'm not having any problems on my 1920 × 1200 screen.
What kind of mouse? I'm beginning to think there's a big difference in behavior when it comes to mice.
Todd Smith
I've got an HP mouse (Model: N3 Ball) that came with my HP desktop. I've also got a Logitech USB mouse (Model: MX518). They both work superb. By the way, my screen is 25.5". That works out to about 88 pixels per inch. I'm not sure if a higher DPI makes it harder, but there are many screens with much higher DPI.
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Daniel Grunwald wrote:
Where do you find those monitors? The resolution tends to go DOWN for new monitors (well, at least the cheap ones). For example, all 22" monitors seem to use a resolution of 1.680 x 1.050. That's only 90 DPI! I've seen 17" monitors that had a better resolution - but those seem to have disappeared now.
Todd Smith
How is a 24" monitor a replacement for a high res 17? Anyway, a 17" 1600x1200 (the minimum needed to exceed 1680x1050) is 118DPI. Your dell is only 94 DPI. You'd need a 2400x1500 resolution in a 24" screen to match the 17's DPI. If the 17" ran 1920x1200 (I know some laptops did this) even a 24" 2560x1600 would be a lesser DPI.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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I think mouse coordination skills factor in as well. I set my mouse speed next to the maximum speed and I'm not having any problems on my 1920 × 1200 screen.
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
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You're welcome. BTW: I only told part of the story. Several years ago I did create a small app that toggles screen resolution between high-res and normal-res with a hotkey. There are several tricky parts in doing it right: - setting the resolution is no problem, just a bit of P/Invoke; however: - all the desktop icons (assuming "snap to grid", no "automatic positioning") move around randomly when they would fall outside the reduced desktop area, so I tried to memorize their position at each resolution and make them move as little as possible. Never fully managed to cope with the "logic" Explorer applies to it though. - all the open Windows that suddenly are larger than the new desktop area, get shrunk by Windows Explorer, which is fine but needs to be undone when switching back to the high-res mode (so a Window that filled most of the screen at high-res does so again when returning to high-res). That works fine, except I have never found a way to get at the dimensions of a minimized window: hence a large but minimized window would shrink automatically but not grow back to its original size. However I stopped using this tool when I started using FireFox, which zooms rather well, except it tries to associate zoom factors with URLs in an uncontrollable manner. I wish I could edit such settings somewhere, and/or limit the zooming to a couple of factors. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
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Do you know the secret to storing/resetting icon placement on the desktop? Every so often something happens and my icons all go kablooey, and then I have to manually drag them all back to where I had them before. I keep looking for some clue as to where Windows stores these positions, but I've never found it. I'd love to be able to run a quick utility to reset everything automagically.
Codemonkeys don't do it at all. Too busy coding.
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Do you know the secret to storing/resetting icon placement on the desktop? Every so often something happens and my icons all go kablooey, and then I have to manually drag them all back to where I had them before. I keep looking for some clue as to where Windows stores these positions, but I've never found it. I'd love to be able to run a quick utility to reset everything automagically.
Codemonkeys don't do it at all. Too busy coding.
Hi, the desktop is a ListView, the icons are ListViewItems, you can get their position with SendMessage(LVM_GETITEMPOSITION); that is the easy part. The problem is, as soon as you set a new position with LVM_SETITEMPOSITION, the desktop gets recalculated and a lot of them move again, including some you already have set at the position you want. I got close, but never got it completely right. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
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Hi, the desktop is a ListView, the icons are ListViewItems, you can get their position with SendMessage(LVM_GETITEMPOSITION); that is the easy part. The problem is, as soon as you set a new position with LVM_SETITEMPOSITION, the desktop gets recalculated and a lot of them move again, including some you already have set at the position you want. I got close, but never got it completely right. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
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It does not make much sense to let the PC calculate the screen content at one resolution and then have the monitor rescale everything to another resolution; when scaling up (or down), it has to create new pixel values without knowing what is actually being rendered. Especially on digital monitors (LED, LCD, plasma) you will get better overall image quality by keeping the resolution equal to the number of pixels that are physically available in your monitor, and by giving Windows the actual DPI value. That way, rather than having the monitor trying to scale everything, Windows will draw almost everything to the right size; images will get interpolated better, and texts (using TrueType or other smart font technology) will render much better. The one thing that will not work properly is elements drawn with pixel sizes, rather than physical sizes (inches, points, ...). :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
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I know it's getting a bit old but..
Luc Pattyn wrote:
Especially Only on digital monitors (LED, LCD, plasma)
Good ol' CRT's always have multiple resolution on which they work well, unless they are so old that they must be broken already. The one I'm using now can do 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864 and 1280x1024 without skipping pixels or deforming the screen too much. It's a 17 inch screen and I'm using 1152x864 because 1280x1024 makes things too small (changing DPI breaks too many programs and is not useful for CRT's anyway, could just as well change resolution and have it render faster as a bonus) and too slow (only 60Hz versus 75Hz). 1024x768 would normally be fine but I need more screen space for Visual Studio.
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Do you know the secret to storing/resetting icon placement on the desktop? Every so often something happens and my icons all go kablooey, and then I have to manually drag them all back to where I had them before. I keep looking for some clue as to where Windows stores these positions, but I've never found it. I'd love to be able to run a quick utility to reset everything automagically.
Codemonkeys don't do it at all. Too busy coding.
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Do you log in to your system remotely, using RDC at all? When I do that from a system that has a smaller monitor, my icons get scrunched up to fit the smaller monitor.
Yep. Or sometimes when you run a game that changes the resolution, or a dozen other things. I've seen others complain about this all over the place, so I'm surprised it's not something MS ever thought to fix.
Codemonkeys don't do it at all. Too busy coding.