Laptop using less than half the screen while booting up

Illkillya

Apologies if this has been posted before, but I had a search and didn't see it... I have come across this a few times on other laptops, but now it has happened to my own so I want to find out how to fix it...

My laptop (dell inspiron 8000) while booting up only fills a small square in the center of the laptop screen. I installed a new hard drive recently because my old one broke, and prior to installing the gfx drivers, this problem existed in windows also.

The graphics drivers allowed it to run in full screen, but only at 1600x1200 resolution, and if I were to lower the resolution, or play a game like Quake then the screen size would be reduced and it would no longer take up the full screen.

Can someone tell me whats up with this?

SouperComputer

LCD panels cannnot "resize" pixels in the way that a CRT tube can.

Each panel has a native resolution, which is the exact amount of pixels on the panel. Any less than that usually fills the amount of the image.

IE:

Native res: 1024x768
Image: 640x480

The image will appear in the centre of the screen and occupy that amount of pixels.

Most laptops have a setting in BIOS to overcome this, usually called HV expansion or somthing to that effect. It makes the lower res's look blocky as hell but should sort the problem out. This would sortout the bootup image size anyway.

Have a look in BIOS and see what you find....

djmarkus

On my laptop there's no way to resize while booting up, it has to be done via the driver settings in windows.

ressem

On the dell Inspiron 8000 I think that you press Fn-F7 (Font) to rescale the screen.