Screen Size/Resolution Problems With Toshiba Laptop

[Southy]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 2400 Laptop that is almost 3 years old now, but for the longest time, whenever I go to play games on it, once I load the game, the screen resolution would shrink, the games would load fine etc, but there would be about an inch of black all the way around the screen and the game would load in the middle. Its like the screen resolution just shrinks.

The computer also has video out, and whenever I have hooked it up to a TV, I could never get the screen resolution to shrink down small enough to fit the screen, it is always at least double the size so you could never watch anything on the tv, at least not at a normal size.

I recently just tried booting linux off a boot cd and when I did that, the screen resolution also shinks down and there is about an inch of black all the way around as I described above....

I have recently tried updating the drivers with the windows xp home cd and I have SP2 installed... I dont know what else to try or do...

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[speedyink]

This would be normal. On most (if not all) Laptop LCD's have a fixed Resolution. That means if you have a 1024x768 resolution screen and you use a 800x600 resolution game, the viewable area will shrink because the screen can not fill with an 800x600 resolution. So in your games either bump up the resolution, or just make do. A lot of the games I play on my laptop only go up to 800x600, so I have gotten used to the border.

 

[Southy]

That makes sense and is fine and all, I guess I can deal with that... The only thing is, I have tried to install linux on the machine before, and I have reinstalled windows before on it, and when I was running the install for both OS's, the screen was shrinking down even then... you would think that it shouldnt do that or is that all part of the same idea you were saying and cannot be fixed?

 

[OS Dragon]

Try using the following proram Program: This Way ^

 

[speedyink]

The screen resolution going down then would be because when you instal a new OS by default the screen resolution is set at 800x600. When you adjust the resolution to 1024x768 (or whatever you screen resolution is) it should fill up the screen. The reason why OS's default at a lower resolution, is so it doesnt make a computer that isnt compatable with higher resolutions unable to run. This is just something you will have to deal with when using laptops.