micky said:
My older brother tells me that he was using Gmail on a laptop and
suddently the screen changed so that the characters were much smaller.
He had already tried turning the computer off and then back on. I
didn't ask how long it was off.
Maybe it was just overheating?? I don't think he uses a cooler
between the laptop and the table.
I don't even know if Gmail has its own software or if one uss a web
browser.
But I sugggested he press Cntl-0 and he said that helped some, so I
suggested cntl-+ and at first that seemed to help but then he noticed
the image had gotten bigger and part of it wasn't on the screen
anymore. So I wasn't undoing something he had done by accident. I
was just making it bigger to counteract something else which made it
smaller.
Is this a hardware failure? This sort of thing seems more likely
for a failing CRT monitor than a laptop screen.
Does Gmail use its own software or just any webbrowser?
He thinks the ISP Comcast somehow caused the problem. My brother
doesn't know much about computers but maybe he has a reason I don't
know about. Any chance it's caused by Comcast?
Thanks a lot.
If it was me, I think I'd at least start by checking the Display
control panel, and find the slider that controls resolution. But
you'd also have to remember what your "normal" setting is, to understand
if that changed. And before doing this, you'd also want to check
whether everything on the computer is a different size, or just
that GMail page. Checking this, if only GMail was an issue,
probably wouldn't make sense (as this is a more "global" control).
http://www.desksite.com/faq/DPI-Settings/images/XP-display_properties.jpg
Windows also has a setting for Appearance, that controls the DPI of text.
That would change how text appears in the desktop. I bump this up, so
any text boxes Windows draws, uses larger text. If you bump this up,
the text can go "off the side" of the dialog box, so Windows doesn't
really handle such a change that well.
http://kb.eng-software.com/images/dpisetting.gif
The web browser itself, has "default" font sizes for the browser.
If a naive web programmer (like if I tried to write HTML) were
to code a page, and not do anything special for fonts, perhaps
I'd end up with Time-Roman 16 point font, and some browser preference
would sort that. There should be two font preferences in the browser
preference section, to handle HTML that doesn't specify fonts.
But most of the time, web programmers tightly control how text appears,
so the chances of a browser setting upsetting things, are pretty slim.
Only some home user, using their "5 MB free web site" with their ISP,
might end up serving web pages with no control over font choice or size.
In a web browser, you can do "View : Source" and review HTML code,
but the typical complex web page uses style sheets and a bunch of other
stuff, guaranteed to make it impossible to figure anything out. Again,
only the most naively designed HTML, could be analysed by checking out
the source code itself.
*******
Laptops are slightly special when it comes to video.
The LCD panel used, may have a fixed resolution. Like maybe 1440x900.
The video driver, provided by the likes of Dell, would know the
model is natively 1440x900, and set the resolution accordingly.
A user might select a lower resolution (to make things appear larger),
and that would work, if something on the computer can "scale" the
image. On an LCD monitor, a scaler chip might do something like
that. On the laptop, maybe the GPU is capable of scaling say
1024x768, into the native 1440x900 the LCD panel needs. As
far as I know, the panel on the laptop is dumb, and doesn't
have nearly as much silicon on it, for processing the digital image.
It would only have horizontal and vertical drivers, to turn the
pixels on and off.
The LCD panel, even lacks a declaration of its resolution. In my
example, I mentioned 1440x900. Now, say you crack the LCD panel one
day, look on Ebay, and some turnip tries to sell you a 1680 wide
panel. It happens to have the same physical dimensions, but the pixels
are a different size (smaller). When you turn on the laptop, a "smaller"
image appears in the upper left hand corner. If you counted the
pixels, the active area of the panel would be 1440x900, and all the
pixels from 1440 to 1680 would be black. In that case, the GPU,
via the video card driver, is told to use 1440. And the computer
has no way of knowing the wrong panel is installed. Now, if the
1680 panel was a "build option" for the laptop, and you could
locate the video card driver package for the 1680 version
of the laptop, then the image would go back to filling the screen.
I doubt your problem is along those lines, and instead, I'd
start by viewing the standard OS controls, to see if something
changed. While the GMail HTML might have made the text setting
smaller (because the code would be controlling that), you'll have
to look at other aspects of the laptop, to see if all text is affected,
or only the GMail page, and only in a specific browser.
Paul
