How to change your computer’s screen resolution in Windows

Posted on April 11, 2007 at 8:05 am

I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 15″ widescreen display and I keep my resolution at 1920×1200, which allows me to work with lots of screen real estate, but makes everything quite tiny! If you want to change your screen resolution in order to make things look bigger (or smaller), here’s how you can do it:

Right click on your Desktop and go to Properties.

One the Display dialog, click on Settings (the tab farthest to the right). You’ll see a section called “Screen resolution” with the word Less on the left side and More on the right side.

Dragging the little bar to the left will result in a lower resolution, which means everything will be bigger. Screen resolution is basically the number of pixels that will be drawn on the screen horizontally and vertically. So 1600×1200 means 1600 pixels horizontally and 1200 pixels vertically. The less number of pixels used to draw the entire screen, the bigger everything will be. Just think that if you had to fit 1600 things into a space or fit 800 things into the same sized space, the 800 things would obviously have to take up more room to fill the space.

You can also choose a color quality or 16 bit or 32 bit. Most computers can support 32-bit, so choose that. However, if for some reason you don’t see that option or your computer is only using 16 colors, that means you need to update the driver for your video card. Go to the manufactuer’s web site and get the latest driver.