Do me a favor, will ya? Minimize this window and right-click on your desktop. Select “Properties” and then click on the “Settings” tab. OK, do you see a slider on the left hand side of the window? It’ll probably say something like 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024 and so on. Slide it back and forth and see your screen resolution. When you’re done playing, click “cancel” and come back to this page.
Here’s why I asked you to do that: your computer’s monitor is a fixed size. Statistically, it’s probably 17″ or 19″ across diagonally, but it could be a bit smaller or larger. Whether you have an “old school” CRT monitor or a “new school” LCD monitor, it’s all a piece of glass that can’t be made any larger or smaller.
I’m telling you this because your video card is currently running at some particular resolution, say 800×600. What that means is that your computer is displaying 800 pixels across the length of the monitor and 600 pixels from the bottom to the top. If you change it to a higher resolution, you’re cramming more pixels into the physical space of your monitor – clicking it up to the next notch means that you have 1024 across the length and 768 from top to bottom. You might also notice that the icons and taskbar appear smaller, but guess what? You actually now have much more screen space. On the flip side, if you have a 21″ monitor and are running at 800×600, your pixels are probably HUGE! Looking at your monitor might be like looking at a Xerox copy of a newspaper photograph that’s been enlarged several times – dot here, dot there, dots everywhere!
If you find yourself constantly scrolling from side to side in your web browser or Excel, you are a excellent candidate for kicking up your screen resolution to the next highest level. Don’t like it at first? Give yourself a week and go back if you don’t. But please read on!
Why are screen resolutions such weird numbers?
Why 800×600 or 1024×768? Well, if you’re into DVDs at all, you probably know that a standard American television set has a 4:3 ratio (also called 1.33:1). This means that your TV screen is 1:33 inches wide for every 1 inch tall. Thus, if you divide the numbers that make up screen resolution, you’ll find that most of them equal that same 1.33:1 ratio:
800 / 600 = 1.333333
1024 / 768 = 1.333333
1280 / 960 = 1.333333
1280 / 1024 = 1.25
1600 / 1200 = 1.333333
Why is 1280×1024 the odd man out? I’ll get to that in a bit, but here is one important thing: if you are using a CRT monitor DO NOT use 1280×1024! If you don’t believe that it’s a bad idea, set your screen resolution to 1280×1024 and then open up a graphics program like MS Paint or Photoshop or Corel Draw or whatever. Draw what you believe is a pretty nice circle then save the pic. Go back to one of the standard resolutions and open the pic – looks more like a football than a soccer ball, doesn’t it? Any image you create and send to friends – be it drawings or edits of digital photos – will look just as screwy to them as the circle does to you now.
OK, but why do YOU care about MY screen resolution?
One of the main tools people that create websites use is tables. Yep, tables – just like you’ve probably made in Microsoft Word. Most websites use tables to make sure that every item on a page is placed in the right place relative to each other. But here’s the thing: when making tables, HTML gives you two options: a fixed pixel size or a percentage of the screen. Thus the budding webmaster has a dilemma: which to use? If he or she uses a fixed pixel width – such as 700 pixels so it will fit Windows XP’s minimum 800×600 resolution – people that visit using higher resolutions will have HUGE bits of blank space on the right-hand side of the web browser. It looks ugly! So why not use percentages? Well, most folks do. “100%” means that the table will use 100% of the browser window. If you grab the lower right-hand edge of this page and resize this window, it will automatically rescale itself to fit your browser window size. Which generally is a good thing. But it does pose some problems. Things like images cannot be resized easily, so most of my old (now gone and converted to another format) photo galleries had 3 columns of pics – to please you 800×600 freaks – which looks crappy on a higher-resolution. And sometimes things that look like full, eye-pleasing paragraphs on smaller resolutions look like just a sentence or two on a larger one. Trade-offs have to be made and the webmaster has to draw a line in the sand somewhere – which is why lots of websites say things like “Best enjoyed at 800×600” on the homepage. I test all my pages at 1024×768 so if it looks crappy on your screen, jack up your screen resolution and don’t bitch at me!
What about LCDs?
LCDs are manufactured to work at a fixed resolution. Check your owner’s manual or the Sunday ads for Best Buy if you don’t believe me. Running at some other resolution makes text look fuzzy, especially on cheaper LCDs. You don’t know how many times I’ve been to people’s desks and had them complain about headaches – only to see that they’re running their LCD at 800×600 when it was made to run at 1024×768. “Ewwwww.. that’s WAY too small!” they’ll say when I change it. I used to try to explain all this to them: “see how the text is razor-sharp now?” “But it’s too small!” “Well, they’re your eyes. Headaches come from looking at out-of-focus text all day, not ‘small text’. But hey, it’s your headache.” But in the end I stopped caring. Now maybe this page will help.