laptop screen resizes itself

[Guest]

Hi,
My 2 year old Dell inspiron 8200 laptop has a 15 inch screen of maximum
resolution 1600x1200, and runs XP home. It worked fine at first, but then
after a while, decided that every time I closed the screen and opened it
again, and every time I started up the computer, it would resize itself so
that if I was using say 1024x768 pixels, the area which actually displayed
anything would be about 1600/1024 of the screen size (ie the outer third of
my screen was just black).

I could avoid this problem by setting it to the maximum resolution, but 1600
pixels on a 15 inch screen started to hurt my eyes, so I stopped doing that.
I recently reinstalled windows, which fixed the problem for about a week, but
now it's doing it again. Can anyone help me?

 

[Pavel A.]

Greg,
This is a stretching parameter of the LCD.
It is independent of the resolution. Usually it is enabled,
then the picture fills the whole screen for resolution less than
native. Somehow you've set it off. Check in the BIOS setup, maybe
it can be enabled from there.
The best is to ask Dell support how to turn the stretching on.
--PA