PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

15.4 Configuring Video Under Windows 98/Me/2000/XP

Windows
98/Me/2000/XP video is configured from the Display Properties
Settings dialog, shown in Figure 15-2, and the Display Properties
Settings Advanced dialog, one page of which is
shown in Figure 15-3. To view Display Properties,
run the Display applet from the Control Panel or right-click a vacant
area of the desktop and choose Properties. The following sections
describe how to use Display Properties to configure Window 98/Me
video settings. Windows 2000/XP is similar, with minor differences in
the appearance, names, and functions of the dialogs.

Figure 15-2. The Display Properties Settings page, where you configure hardware settings for your video adapter and monitor

Figure 15-3. The Advanced Settings dialog, where you configure specific settings for the adapter and monitor, enable or disable video acceleration settings, and choose Color Management options (the exact pages in this dialog vary according to the video adapter and driver installed)

15.4.1 Installing or Changing Video Drivers

Windows
98/Me does reasonably well at detecting common video adapters and
installing the proper drivers for them. However, you may need to
install a video driver manually in one of the following
circumstances:

Windows 98/Me does not have a driver for your adapter. This situation
is more common than you might expect. For example, Windows 98/Me does
not provide a driver for the ubiquitous Intel i740 video adapter.
This situation may also arise if you install a new video adapter in
an existing Windows 98/Me system.

Windows 98/Me has a driver for your adapter and recognizes the
hardware, but you have a more recent driver supplied by the adapter
manufacturer. Manufacturers often provide enhanced drivers that are
faster or support more features than the vanilla drivers included
with Windows 98/Me.

Windows 98/Me has a driver for your adapter, but fails to autodetect
the presence of the adapter, or autodetects the adapter as a
different model than is actually present. This situation also arises
more often than it should.

To install a new or updated video adapter, first visit the video
adapter manufacturer's web site and download the
latest Windows 98/Me drivers for your adapter. Get the most recent
release version of the driver, avoiding beta or unsupported versions.
To install the driver, display the Settings page, click Advanced,
choose the Adapter tab, and click Change to start the Update Device
Driver Wizard.

Also use this dialog to set refresh rate. Available options depend on
the combination of monitor, adapter, and driver being used. When
using a Plug-and-Play monitor, the usual choices are

Optimal which selects the highest refresh
rate supported by both the monitor and adapter at the current
resolutionand

Adapter default , which
simply uses the (usually low) refresh rate that the adapter defaults
to. Some configurations allow you to specify actual refresh
ratese.g., 60, 70, 72, 75, and 85 Hz. Before you specify a
refresh rate manually, make sure your monitor supports that refresh
rate at the resolution and color depth you have selected. Some
configurations do not allow changing refresh rate, in which case the
refresh rate drop-down list does not appear.

Some manufacturers supply video drivers as executable files. Running the program installs the driver and may add a custom tab to the Display Properties dialog that allows you to set properties for that driver and adapter. Such drivers also often put a video management utility in the system tray, which you can use to change settings on the fly.

When you change resolution or refresh rate, some
monitors automatically adjust to the new settings and display a
properly centered image. Others require changing vertical and
horizontal size and centering adjustments on the monitor to display
the image properly. If you select a resolution and refresh rate that
the monitor cannot display, the screen may be blank or filled with
wavy lines. To correct this problem, restart the computer in Safe
Mode by pressing F8 during boot and choosing Safe Mode. Choose the
Standard VGA driver, restart the system normally, use Display
Properties to select the proper driver and display settings that your
monitor supports, and then restart the system normally.

15.4.2 Changing the Screen Area Setting

The screen area setting determines how much information is displayed
on the screen by specifying the resolution of the image that the
video adapter delivers to the monitor. The default resolution
installed by Setup will be within the capabilities of your video
adapter and monitor, but may not be optimum. Use the Screen area
slider in Display Properties Settings to change
resolution. Note that the selection range is not continuous. If your
monitor is Plug-N-Play-compliant and recognized by Windows 98/Me,
Windows allows you to select only those discrete values that are
supported by both the video adapter and monitor.

Although Windows 98/Me itself supports changing resolution on the
fly, doing so requires that the video adapter and driver support that
feature. Changing resolution with some older video adapters and
drivers requires shutting down and restarting Windows. If this is the
case with your system, Windows notifies you that a shutdown is
required to put the change into effect and allows you to shutdown
immediately or defer doing so. If you choose the latter,
configuration changes do not take effect until you later restart the
system manually.

If the monitor type is not recognized by Windows, be careful when changing resolution settings. Depending on the default monitor setting, Windows may allow you to select a resolution setting higher than the monitor actually supports. At best, this results in an unreadable display. At worst, it may overdrive and damage the monitor. A seriously overdriven monitor may begin whining like a Star Trek phaser about to self-destruct, with similarly catastrophic results likely. If this happens, turn off the monitor immediately . More than a few seconds of this abuse may turn a monitor into scrap. If you find yourself with Windows set to a resolution that the monitor cannot display, shut down and restart Windows in Safe Mode. Use the procedure described at the end of the preceding section to reconfigure Windows to use a video driver and display settings that are supported by your hardware.

15.4.3 Enabling and Using QuickRes

If you frequently need to change resolution or color depths, the
preceding procedure gets old fast. Enabling the Windows 98/Me
QuickRes utility allows you to change resolution and color depth on
the fly. To enable QuickRes, choose Display Properties
Settings Advanced. On the
General page of that dialog, mark the Show settings icon on task bar
checkbox. With QuickRes enabled, clicking its icon in the system tray
displays a menu that displays all combinations of resolution and
color depth supported by the video adapter and monitor, and marks the
active settings with a check mark. Change resolution or color depth
by clicking the combination you want to use. The Adjust Display
Properties menu item provides a one-click method for invoking Display
Properties when you need to change properties other than those shown
on the QuickRes menu.

QuickRes was first released as one of the unsupported Windows 95 Power Toys utilities, but is integral to Windows 98/Me. If you installed QuickRes under Windows 95 and then upgraded to Windows 98/Me, the Windows 95 version of QuickRes may still appear in your system tray. If so, you can continue to use it. If you prefer to remove the older version and install the Windows 98/Me version, you'll have to edit the Registry. To do so, start the Registry Editor and open the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Double-click the value entry Taskbar Display Controls to edit the entry. Change the value entry, which should be RunDLL deskcp16.dll, QUICKRES_RUNDLLENTRY to RunDLL deskcp16.dll , and save the change. You can then enable QuickRes 98 by marking the checkbox as described previously.

15.4.4 Changing Performance Setting

By default, Windows 98/Me configures the video driver it installs to
use all accelerator functions. Ordinarily, this setting works
properly and can be left as is. If you experience video problems,
including a mouse pointer that is jerky (check that your mouse is
clean first) or disappears entirely, odd video artifacts, or program
crashes, Windows 98/Me permits you to selectively disable some video
acceleration functions (Display Properties
Settings Advanced Performance).
Before you use this feature, first attempt to locate and install an
updated video driver. Otherwise, choose an accelerator setting as
follows:

All accelerator functions enabled.

Most accelerator functions enabled. Use this setting if you
experience minor video or mouse problems. Performance will be
degraded somewhat but may be acceptable, particularly for simple 2D
applications such as word processing.

Most accelerator functions disabled. Use this setting if you
experience severe video problems or have one or more programs that
routinely hang. With this setting enabled, performance may be
marginally acceptable for text applications, but little else. Make
getting a better video card a high priority.

All accelerator functions disabled. Use this setting only if it is
required to allow your system to run without crashing. When this
setting is enabled, your video card is acting as a simple frame
grabber, and its performance will almost certainly be unacceptable
even for text applications. If you find this setting is required,
replace your video card as soon as possible.

Windows 2000/XP uses a slider bar to offer similar performance
settings in the Display Properties Settings
Advanced Troubleshooting
dialog. The slider bar allows the following settings:

Disables all accelerations. Use this setting only if your computer
frequently stops responding or has other severe problems.

Disables all but basic accelerations. Use this setting to connect
more severe problems.

Disables all DirectDraw and Direct3D accelerations, and all cursor
and advanced drawing accelerations. Use this setting to correct
severe problems with DirectX-accelerated applications.

Disables all cursor and advanced drawing accelerations. Use this
setting to correct drawing problems.

Disables cursor and bitmap accelerations. Use this setting if you
experience mouse problems (jerky or disappearing pointer) or image
corruption.

Enables all accelerations. This is the default setting for most
recent Windows versions (Windows Server 2003 defaults to None) and
the recommended setting unless you are experiencing video problems.

These descriptions of problems and recommended settings are based on
Microsoft's advice. We recommend using settings
other than Full only as temporary measures for troubleshooting. Your
video adapter and driver should support Full acceleration. If they
don't, something is wrong. Try updating the video
driver to the latest stable version offered by the video adapter
manufacturer. If that doesn't work, use a different
video adapter.

15.4.5 Setting Font Size

Windows uses Small Fonts by default, but allows you to select
predefined Large Fonts, or to specify a custom font size by choosing
Other. The font size setting you select provides a
"baseline" value from which the
size of vector-based fonts used in applications is calculated.
Choosing one of the predefined settings also installs a set of raster
fonts that are used for such things as icon labels. A common reason
for using Large Fonts is when you run higher than standard
resolutione.g., 1024x768 on a 15-inch monitor, where using
Large Fonts or a custom font size allows you to make the text large
enough to be readable. Be cautious, however. Many applications do not
display properly using anything except Small Fonts. Note that instead
of changing font size directly (Display Properties
Settings Advanced General), you
can achieve similar results by selecting a different Scheme in the
Appearance page of the Display Properties dialog.

15.4.6 Using Color Management

Getting consistent color across a wide range of peripherals,
including monitors, scanners, and printers, is nontrivial, a task
made more difficult by the diverse means used for producing color.
Monitors produce color by illuminating phosphors. Printers may
produce output that uses transmitted or reflected light to produce
color by means of dyes or pigments. Scanners may capture either
transmitted or reflected images. The color temperature of the
lighting used to produce or view an image differs according to its
source, and the gamma (in simple terms, contrast) varies with the
device. With so many variables in play, the colors on your monitor
are likely to be only an approximation of the original colors you
scanned, and printed output is likely to differ substantially from
both the original and the image on your monitor.

The different methods used to produce color mean that it is
impossible to render color with complete consistency. A printed copy,
for example, simply does not have the dynamic range that a
transparency or monitor image has. But for those doing prepress work,
some means of minimizing those differences is needed. To address this
problem, Microsoft introduced

Image Color
Management (

ICM ) with Windows 95. ICM
organizes the characteristics of each device (e.g., for a scanner,
the color temperature of the light source and the gamma of the image
sensor; for a printer, the reflectivity characteristics of its
various inks) and uses those stored characteristics to make color
reproduction as consistent as possible across different devices.

Windows 98/Me includes the ICM V 2.0 API, which improves on the
limited capabilities of ICM V 1.0. Previously, you had to define
color characteristics for each combination of application and device.
Windows 98/Me allows you to define color management profiles which
take into account the specific imaging color characteristics of each
input and output device and allow all installed applications to use
that shared profile to maintain color consistency. ICM
characteristics for scanners and printers are set in the drivers for
those applications. Those for monitors are set in Display Properties
Settings Advanced
Color Management.

Color management is an extremely complex issue. For more information,
search the Microsoft web site for "Integrated Color
Management" or ICM.