What's the Deal With My Dell 2001FP?

[Kellon]

Please forgive me--I posted this earlier this morning at the end of the previous post about a 2001fp problem but it's probably buried too deep for anyone to see. With the number of y'all out there that have this monitor, there must be someone who can give me a lead on what's going on.

I just got it yesterday. Initially, the DVI connection wouldn't work, so I had to uninstall all of the video drivers and reinstall the updated drivers. After getting the DVI connection to work, and adjusting the monitor settings to 60 Hertz refresh, 1280x1024 (I have trouble seeing the 1600x1200 at the moment and need to get used to it), and Highest color quality (32 bit), I find that all wallpaper (even the MS stuff that came with XP) and pictures look like "paint by numbers." It's all "splotchy" and there is no smooth shading. It's even worse at the higher resolution, but gets better as I go down in resolution. I've never seen anything like this in any of the stores where I've seen 20-21 inch monitors displayed. Even the default MS XP desktop (the one with the clouds and green fields) is terrible.

Is this normal when you move to a higher monitor setting? Anybody else notice the same thing when moving from a CRT to an LCD or from analog to digital? I have an NVIDIA GeForce 2MX 400 card, with 64 MB RAM, in the pc, and my research on the card doesn't indicate any issues with a 20 inch display at my current resolution, or at 1600x1200.

I don't know if I'm describing this well enough, so I hope you have some idea of what I mean. I sure hope someone can give me some ideas because I'm pretty disappointed at the moment. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Thanks for your help.

Kellon

[BusterStacks]

For one, take a screenshot. For two, what's your video card?

[Kellon]

OK, I've got a screenshot of my desktop. How do I show it to you without totally screwing up the thread.

My card is an NVIDIA GeForce 2MX 400 with 64 MB RAM.

[Eratosthenes]

Hi Kellon--

Many LCD monitors work best at only at the native resolution. CRTs make any size pixel (dot) that it needs to display between the max and min resolution. LCD monitors only make pixels that correspond to the native resolution. Therefore, when you set the resolution to 1280x1024 your graphics card sends a 1280x1024 signal to your monitor. The monitor processes that 1280x1024 signal into a 1600x1200 picture. Depending on the match between the native and desired resolutions, this processing can yield variable results.

One thing you might try is to set the resolution to 800x600, so that one pixel from your graphics card maps to four on your monitor. This should make a fairly decent picture, though with jaggies.

Hope this was helpful.

[slavic]

If your running the LCD at 1280x1024 it's going to look blocky. The accepted method to handle the small sized icons is to change your DPI settings. So you run the desktop at 1600x1200 and scale everything up. Unfortunatly Party doesn't like this.

[Kellon]

It gets even worse (blockier, etc.) when I set it at the native resolution of 1600x1200. I set down to 1280x1024 to reduce the problem, which it does somewhat. But that's all ridiculous isn't it? Isn't my card -- NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 -- supposed to handle a 20" LCD monitor in DVI?

Seriously, though, I appreciate your help. Anything else you can think of?

[wabe]

That's an older video card...it's possible that it has a problem with those resolutions. Were you able to run those same resolutions on your old CRT without issues?

I'm using a Ti4400 and using the DVI connection, and haven't experienced those issues at 1600x1200. I have not tried running at lower resolutions.

[Kellon]

The CRT that I'm replacing is a 19". I believe I tried running it at 1600x1200 once just to see what it looked like and don't recall any problems at all. And that was before I installed the updated drivers. This really bites!

[slavic]

Oops I didn't look at your video card. It's quite old at this point. Early versions of DVI couldn't handle resolutions larger than 1280x1024, I have no idea if this is your problem but I do have a few older workstation cards (Integraph) that show this problem.

Your quick solution would be to use the analog line(vga 15 pin minidin), but a new video card would likely make you happier.

[Eratosthenes]

yep, Slavic is right--I should have thought of this.

There is a recent post at Tom's Hardware that talks about this. I bow to Slavic's superior geekiness.