Screen Blurryness

[ThePlague]

I got a new laptop today, and for some reason everything looks sort of blurred, especially text. It's an IBM Thinkpad T43 with XP Pro and settings at 32 bit color and 1280x1024 resolution. I installed the gfx drivers (I think) and it didn't make a difference.

Anyone have any ideas? And if you need any more specs just ask and i'll post em.

[BobtheGreatII]

You know... I've been kind of having this problem too lately... thought I was going crazy... but a solution might be nice.

[ThePlague]

Yeah, at first I thought it was my glasses, but I cleaned them twice today and it's still blurry so...

[Mr Buckshot]

How do you get 1280x1024 on a laptop? I've seen 1280x800 many times, but never 1280x1024...

Perhaps you have a screen whose native resolution is higher than 1280x1024 and somehow the res got set to 1280x1024...happened to me once on an XP laptop, somehow the old game I was running also reset my overall desktop resolution and I didn't realize it until I started to wonder why the text was so blurry.

[ThePlague]

Well see, and be amazed:
http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn64/Hazard1337/seewatididthar.png

And what do you mean by native res? It started off on 1280x1024, I changed it to 1024x760, but changed it back because I felt it was too big.

[Jean-Luc]

Laptop's use LCD panels, and if you run anything lower than native resolution on the desktop or in games, you'll find that everything starts to blur. I'd be willing to bet your laptop's native res is either 1400x900 or 1280x800

[ThePlague]

alright, so I changed it to 1280x800 and the blur does go away, but it doesn't show the full screen, I have to move the mouse to the corner and then it decides to show that part.

[klange]

T43's have a native resolution of 1400 x 1050 (They also aren't widescreen).

Running a laptop at anything other than its optimal resolution is a bad idea for a number of reasons. Some systems don't do proper hardware scaling, leaving you with a slower refresh rate; you also run the risk of having a totally incorrect aspect ratio; and of course, you're always going to have a blurry screen as multiple - but rarely ever integer multiples - screen pixles are used to display one output pixel.

e: Alternatively, they can come with (ich) 1024x768 displays. But I assume this is only with an old Intel chipset. You probably have a 1400x1050, as there's no reason for your display drivers (on a laptop) to even advertise support for 1280x1024 if it can't do it natively, and would quite nicely explain your issues.

[Syuusuke]

Are you sure your monitor supports up to those dimensions?

[Phopojijo]

Well see, and be amazed:
http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn64/Hazard1337/seewatididthar.png

And what do you mean by native res? It started off on 1280x1024, I changed it to 1024x760, but changed it back because I felt it was too big.Yeah... if your slider's not all the way to the right something's wrong.

The videocard should STOP at the highest resolution your monitor can support... since it can go higher... your monitor is probably set to a lower resolution than it can support.

Try the slider all the way to the right... then move back to find a resolution that works best for you. They monitor SHOULD be best ALL the way to the right... if not there's something wrong with your monitor drivers... (your monitor is telling your videocard it can support resolutions it really can't)

This never used to be a problem on CRT monitors because they were very friendly to a wide range of resolutions... LCD monitors on the other hand can really only take one... they resize anything else to fit on their pixels... which makes it look blurry ((think image resizing in photoshop or MS Paint))

[ThePlague]

Alright, I set it to the native resolution and nothing's blurry. Thanks for your help guys.