A reader questioned me this week about a difference between their monitor and their friend’s.  They said that their computer only shows about 8-9 icons to a column on their desktop and their friend’s shows 12-14 in one column; why?

It is all resolution, or how closely packed the pixels are on your screen.  “Pixels” are the tiny color dots and black spaces that make up everything you see on your monitor.  The old favorite, and now mostly retired, size was 800×600.  This translates to mean that you see 800 dots of color across your screen and 600 from top to bottom (width is given first).

Therefore, if you have a picture on your screen that is 400 pixels wide it will fill half the width of your monitor.  My home computer has a resolution of 1280 x 1024.  This means the same 400 pixel picture on my monitor will fill up about one third of my monitor’s viewable width. 

To change your screen resolution, right click on a blank spot on your desktop.  Select “Properties” from the pop-up menu and click on the Settings tab.

On the left you will see the “Screen Resolution” slide bar.  Move the slider by holding down the left mouse button and dragging it to the left or to the right to change resolution. The current resolution numbers will appear under the slider. Click on Apply and click on OK to set your screen resolution.

(Remember, lower resolutions will display larger letters and icons, while higher resolutions display smaller letters and icons.)  Finally click “Apply”, then “OK”.

Windows XP will give you fifteen seconds to decide if the new screen resolution looks good or not.  If you like the way the screen looks, click Yes; if not, click No and go and try again.  Don’t panic if you can’t see the screen at all.  Windows will automatically slip back to your original settings after fifteen seconds.

If the resolution is greater than “800 x 600″ you may be able to see items on your screen more clearly.  Equal to, or less than that setting and you may not view a web site without scrolling from left to right which (according to web stats) people in English speaking countries hate to do.

I suggest you try setting your resolution to at least 1024 x 768 and see how you like it. 

You should know that modern games will set their own resolution when you play them and reset to the original after the game ends.  So you don’t have to worry about altering resolutions for games.

Last, but not least, remember that it is your computer so use the setting that you like most.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.