On 9 Jul 2003, at 20:33, Bob & Trish Henson wrote:
> We have an old Toshiba laptop which has a small screen. I have tried often
> to get the picture to fill the whole screen but I always get a big border.
> It is loaded with Win98SE - I have gone to screen properties and chosen the
> option to stretch on the display, selected apply and okay but it does not
> change.
>
> Any suggestions.
>
> Many thanks
> Trish Henson
Flat panel displays work very differently from CRTs.
On a CRT, the screen surface has zillions of tiny coloured light-emitting
elements, much finer than the beams that sweep across the screen and
activate them. It's relatively easy to tweak the width of the beams, the
length of each horizontal pass, the vertical separation between sweeps, or
even the sweep frequency. Each display pixel is spread over a whole bunch
of tiny screen elements.
On a flat panel, normally each display pixel maps to a single, relatively
large, LED or LCD screen element. There's noting to adjust that can make
them larger or smaller.
The result is that if the laptop's screen provides (example) 800x600
elements, and your Windows screen size is set for 640x480, it will leave 80
unused (unusable!) elements to left and right, and 60 above and below.
To stretch a 640x480 Windows display to cover the full 800x600 screen,
each pixel needs to be 25% taller and wider. But the physical display
elements cannot be split, so even though "stretch" software could try to
approximate this, the results would not look too good.
(The "stretch" option you've found and checked probably stretches a
wallpaper graphic to cover the whole Windows display, rather than stretching
the Windows display to cover the whole physical screen. The small
distortions introduced in streatching may not be as noticeable in a large
photograph as in a screen full of text.)
David Gillett
"Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware
programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column.
http://freepctech.com/rode
|
