Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

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Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

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Recommended Book

Recommended Book 

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

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Configuring Video Options

Depending on the video adapter installed on your computer, you may be able to adjust the resolution and the number of colors displayed on your monitor. This is especially important with the newer, larger monitors.

A computer screen is made up of pixels, which are small units or "dots" that display individual colors on your screen. In a single picture on the screen, each pixel is assigned a color. When seen as a whole, the dots come together visually to make the picture.

A standard VGA monitor has 640x480 pixels (640 pixels across each row and 480 rows). When a larger size monitor still uses 640x480 pixels, the size of the pixels increases and that makes the items on the screen larger but may also cause fonts or figures to look jagged or unfinished. Increasing the size of the pixels doesn't improve the resolution, so you should set a larger screen to display more pixels—800x600 or 1024x768. The more pixels used to create the picture, the higher the screen resolution. With a higher resolution, the monitor picture is crisper and easier to read (although the characters may seem smaller than in the 640x480 setting).

To control the screen resolution, or number of pixels displayed, do the following:

1. Choose Settings, Control Panel from the Start menu, and double-click the Display icon, or right-click the desktop and choose Properties from the pop-up menu.
2. When the Display Properties dialog box opens (see Figure 14.3), select the Settings tab. (Don't be disturbed if your Display Properties dialog box is not exactly like the one shown in Figure 14.3. Some video adapters change the appearance of the dialog box, and yours might be slightly different than the one shown.)
   

   Figure 14.3 Under Screen area, drag the slider to select the number of pixels you want displayed.

3. Under Screen area, drag the slider toward More (if the Screen area is grayed out, your video adapter is not capable of changing the screen resolution). The number of pixels to be displayed appears beneath the slider.
4. Click Apply .
5. A dialog box appears, telling you that Windows will resize your screen. Click OK . If the screen doesn't reappear correctly (don't worry if it flickers at first), wait about 15 seconds and Windows will restore the original setting. Windows may ask to restart your computer in order for the changes to take effect; let it.

If you don't like the new setting, follow the steps above and change the setting back.

Still not satisfied? Is the picture better but the font is too small? To fine-tune the resolution, calibrate your display to match the dimensions of your screen. At the same time, change the size of the screen fonts.

Grab a ruler and follow these steps:

1. Open the Display Properties dialog box and select the Settings tab.
2. Set the Screen area to higher than 640x480.
3. Click Advanced.
4. When the Properties dialog box for your video adapter appears (see Figure 14.4), select the General tab (your dialog box may differ from the one shown, as the features of each video adapter are different).
   

   Figure 14.4 To be able to quickly set the resolution, choose Apply the new display settings without restarting.

5. Under Display, choose Small Fonts (the normal size), Large Fonts (about 120 percent of normal size), or Other from the Font size drop-down list.
6. (Optional) If you chose Other, the Custom Font Size dialog box opens. Hold your ruler up to the ruler on the dialog box. Drag the ruler in the dialog box until it matches the one in your hand. Click OK.
7. Windows 2000 warns you that the settings won't take effect until you restart Windows. Click OK .
8. Click OK to close the video adapter Properties dialog box, and then click OK to close the Display Properties dialog box.

It's also possible to set the number of colors your monitor displays. Some color monitors only display 16 colors; others display as many as 4 billion (32-bit True Color). The more colors your monitor displays, the better your color pictures appear (especially photographs)—up to a point. At that point, adding more colors can't make the picture any better. Increasing the number of colors also has a down side: it takes more bits of data to display more colors, which may slow your computer processor.

1. Open the Display Properties dialog box and select the Settings tab (refer to Figure 14.3).
2. Under Colors , select the color setting you want to use. Only the color settings available with your video adapter are listed.
3. Click OK .
4. Windows warns that your new settings may not be compatible with some of your programs unless you restart the computer immediately. Choose whether you want to restart the computer now with the new settings or apply the new settings without restarting. Click OK.