Dell Inspiron 4000 Screen

[stanger1982]

I turned on my laptop today after about a month of not using and it and seems as if the comos got erased somehow. Anyway, the display is limited to about 50% of the total screen. It is a 14 inch TFT display yet it looks as if it is only using about a 7 inch by 5 inch box in the middle of the screen. I cannot figure out for the life of me how to make adjustments to the screen size as you would with any typical monitor. Does anyone have a clue as to what I should do?

 

[Didou]

Have you tried changing the resolution from within windows ?

 

[stanger1982]

its wierd, it works in windows, but not on the boot up stuff. i guess i just needed to reinstall windows, which was my intended goal anyway.

 

[Rick]

LCD monitors only "fully" support one single resolution.

If your screen is designed to be XGA (1024x768) and your display settings are VGA (640x480), then only a little more than half the screen will get used. So the actual output will look like a small box with a big black border all around it.

There are two solutions. The first one actually fixing it, the second "camouflages" it.

First, you should figure out why this happened all of a sudden. Your video drivers may need to be reinstalled or the resolution settings may need to be set back to the optimal settings (probably 1024x768)

The second idea involves a setting in the BIOS (and sometimes accessible through the Display properties, drivers permitting). Many laptops, including Dell, almost always have a "display stretch" option. So when the image on the LCD is only 640x480 (for example), the LCD will stretch it across the entire size of the screen. This tends to look kind of blurry, but you can enable this setting by tapping F2 when you see the Dell logo on bootup.

 

[Rick]

Originally posted by stanger1982
its wierd, it works in windows, but not on the boot up stuff. i guess i just needed to reinstall windows, which was my intended goal anyway.

NoooOOoOOoOoooOOO! Don't do it!

Windows controls just that.. Windows. Windows doesn't touch anything outside of Windows. So reinstalling Windows will not fix this.

Enabling "Display Stretch", as explained above, will fix this. It also stretches the image across the entire screen during bootup (Dell logo, DOS, Windows logo etc..). These things are almost always VGA, which is 640x480 resolution.

 

[StormBringer]

Hit F2 at POST to enter the BIOS, then press FN+F7 to stretch the display to the screen.

 

[MYOB]

Fn-F7 uusally works at any time without the need to enter the BIOS on Dell laptops. However, some very recent ones (1150) seem to be missing any support for that mode, at all.