Smaller Desktop

[quixote]

This is actually a hardware question, I think. I have a
laptop that was working fine. User said no changes were
made to it. The desktop now is a lot smaller. It used to
take up the whole LCD screen(ie. normal), now it is much
smaller....centered and totally viewable but there is now
a large black border around desktop. Any ideas? Is this a
setting somewhere or is it video card related?
Thanks

 

[Ray at]

Make sure you're running the correct resolution for your laptop. If it's
not ancient, it's likely to be 1024×768. If you switched it to 640×480,
it's not uncommon to see a big black border like that instead of having
everything be all big, due to the nature of flat screen monitors.

Ray at work

 

[quixote]

Ray...the resolution is at 1024×768, that's sort of why
I'm thinking it may be video card but not sure.
Frustrating really. One wierd thing I noticed though...I
went into device manager and looked at display adapters
and Default Monitor was listed 4 times.

 

[Ed Hammond]

Hello,
I've seen this happen on a Dell laptop in particular. The user updated
the graphics driver via windows update, which had a new nvidia video driver
for it. No matter what we changed the resolution could not be fixed
correctly (hence the lareg black border around a small screen you
mentioned).

We had to uninstall that driver and use the drivers that originally came
with the laptop. Perhaps you could try updating the drivers specifically
from the vendor where the laptop was purchased for starters, or if you have
the original drivers reinstall those.

HTH,
Ed

Ray...the resolution is at 1024×768, that's sort of why
I'm thinking it may be video card but not sure.
Frustrating really. One wierd thing I noticed though...I
went into device manager and looked at display adapters
and Default Monitor was listed 4 times.