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widescreen monitor question

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kyrathaba:
I recently acquired a 19" I-Inc TW191D LCD monitor.  My children's 14" AlphaScan 411 CRT was just pathetic, and I didn't want to ruin their eyes, so I gave them my Princeton 17" LCD monitor, and got myself a 19" widescreen.  Mistake?  I'm not sure, yet.  Brightness, sharpness, and all that are fine, and I love the extra space (especially because it obviates the need to break apart C# statements in my IDE editor).  However, text appears slightly stretched horizontally.  Now, I've read this is because you must set your computer's resolution to your LCD's default resolution (which for a 19" wide is what?  1400x900 ?)  Anyway, my PC only has a substandard onboard video (32 mb), so my highest res is 1280x1024.  I have it set at this res, and the results are quite acceptable, but not just the way I want them.  Do I need to buy a dedicated graphics card?  Would this permit me to achieve the optimum resolution for this particular monitor?

P.S.  I also installed an additional 512 MB of SDRAM today :)

Nighted:
Try updating your graphics drivers first...you may luck out and get updated support for widescreen, otherwise you can get a card for around 50 bucks that would do the trick.

nudone:
the quick way would be to set the res at the highest it will possibly go to - this is assuming the options are only showing compatible resolutions that your monitor supports (i think this is the default way of doing it).

but, regardless of what you see in the options, whatever the numbers are for the native 'physical' resolution of your monitor - then that is what you need to set it at.

using the 'real' resolution of the pixels built into the monitor is the only way you'll acheive the sharpest text (or images). Yes, only this way. any other res isn't going to give you that crystal clear sharpness.

another thing is, have you got 'clear type' enabled? if so, turn it off when using the 'native' resolution if you want to see 'sharp' text.

i'm surprised that your graphics card only goes to 1280, are you sure this isn't the actual highest res that the monitor supports.

but the problem you mention of text being stretched horizontally should not occur if everything is set to the 'native' resolution - it wouldn't be a very good widescreen monitor if the physical pixels it has were stretched in such a way as to distort text.

have you perhaps been viewing things on your previous monitor in the 'wrong' resolution - so that the text was actually compressed slighty along the horizontal axis? perhaps you've simply got used to it and now seeing something that is 'correct' looks odd - i guess you'd have noticed such a thing already by looking at other peoples monitors anyway.

edit:

i see that your monitor's highest res is 1440 x 900. if your graphics doesn't support that then, yep, you definitely need a new one.

f0dder:
You probably do need a graphics card, onboard tends to be limited. Shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg, though; if you get along fine with onboard graphics, you should be able to find a cheap card...

PS: you really should break apart statements, even though you no longer need to. Perhaps nobody else but you will ever look at your source, but Very long lines of text are less readable, and hint at code complexity as well. Personally I stay at around 80-100 columns for code.

kyrathaba:
Good point, Fodder.  I'll continue to break apart my long source code lines.

I was able to download an updated driver for my S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR integrated graphics, and it provided me with one additional resolution possibility I hadn't had before:  1280x768.  I compared that to the 1440x900 native resolution of my widescreen monitor, and they're quite close:  a ratio of 1.6 compared to 1.66.  Changed to that res and things look good now.  They didn't look "bad" before, but definitely an improvement.

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