Wide Screen problems

[Availor]

Hello all,

I've recently purchased a laptop since I am not at home most of the time.
It's Intel Centerino 2 DDR2 with 1GB of RAM, and it has a wide screen.

The problem is I can't set the windows to fit the screen, meaning that all the menues and grafhics look wider than they should. The only resolution that works properly is too high and the icons are too small so I can't see anything clearly.

How can I manage Windows to just leave more "free" space? It's very annoying since a square is not a square but a ractangle.

2. I got Windows Home with it, in this computer I use Windows XP pro.
Uninstalling and reinstalling is to tiredous. What's the differance between home and pro?

[RedWombat]

Hi Availor.

I know what you're going through. My laptop has a 17" UXGA display. It's native resolution is 1920 x 1200 which gets very tiny on a 17" display. You basically have two options to make the display more legible. Find a smaller resolution with the same aspect ratio. For me the closest was 1680 x 1050, which makes screen items larger, but the compromise is a slight fuzzy look. The next thing you could try is to change your display fonts to Large Fonts. This has an advantage in that at the native resolution the display items will be larger as well a crisper to view. The downside is that some web sites don't look so good with Large Fonts used.

As for your second question. There are several differences between XP Home and XP Pro. The networking is probably the more obvious. Managing users is a bit different and XP Home does not come with IIS built in. If you don't follow me, you're probably not using any of those features and XP Home would work just fine. :-)

Here's a link to a Microsoft comparison chart that might help:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p...choosing2.mspx

This link just shows the Windows versions with information about each:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e...n/compare.mspx

Hope this helps you.

[Availor]

Thank you for the reply,

It is extremely annoying, since I cant' find an appropriate resolution for that matter. Either the screen is too small, or too large (like 600X800), or everything is wide. Maybe there is an application that can solve that?

[Grafixman]

Not sure about this idea, since I've never messed with widescreen laptops, but if you could turn on the monitor OSD setup where you tweak the color, alignment, brightness, etc, and look for the horizontal size control, perhaps you can adjust it so that the image is squeezed back to square pixels? But you'd be sacrificing the sides of your widescreen this way... . I think widescreen was a bad idea, anyway...