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Thread: Old comp, wacky resolution

  1. Old comp, wacky resolution

    When my vid card fried itself and took the monitor with it, I dug an old computer out of the basement. It's a Pentium 1 running Win 95, with a 2 MB Cirrus Logic PCI video card. When I try to set the resolution (Control Panel>Display>Settings>Desktop Area slider) higher than 640x480, the desktop becomes "bigger". Like, the taskbar extends all the way off the screen, and to see it, I have to "scroll" the desktop by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. So, instead of packing more pixels on the screen, it spreads them over a larger area.

    Is this a problem with the vid card or the monitor? It's a 15 inch Viewsonic CRT monitor, and the manual says it supports up to 1280x1024 (I can't find the vid card manual). I really don't care about fixing the problem, but I do want to re-use the monitor for my new rig, and want to make sure it can display in a decent resolution.

  2. First make sure that the monitor driver is properly installed so that Windows knows the thing's capabilities. It should have come on a disk or disc with the monitor, and can also (hopefully) be downloaded from the manufacturer's website.

  3. Of higher importance is a proper video card driver. Check here for some Cirrus Logic drivers. The company isn't posting them on their site, so that link may be the best you can do.

  4. By the way, the password to download from video-drivers.com and those other sites related to it (that company has like, "modem-drivers.com" and etc.) is as such:

    User: drivers
    P/w: all

    It just worked for me. It's a free signup, but I think it takes a day or so for them to e-mail the info, so sign up and then you can just sign in after that. Unless they've changed it and they send the info quicker.

  5. Thanks for the help. I couldn't find the right driver, though.

    But, I just wanted to clarify: is it even possible for a monitor to not support higher than 640x480 resolutions?

  6. #6
    lithium Guest
    Your video memory is more the limiting factor. The monitor should be fine, assuming it's a standard PC monitor.

    Every pixel on your screen has to live in video memory somewhere. For example this machine I'm on is at 1152x864 with 32 bit color. That requires a bare minimum of 3.8 megs of memory (1152 times 864 times 4 bytes per pixel).

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