8204 Screen Help

There seems to be a lot of people unhappy with the 8204's screen.

While I don't doubt that at least a few people might have defective units, for others it may just be a case of making a few adjustments.

As the machine ships with the screen brightness quite low, the first step is to jack it up, there's two ways to do this:

1. Hold down the "Fn" key (next to left CTRL) and press the Right D-Pad arrow (bottom-right corner of the keyboard) numerous times.

2. Open "ePower Management" (press the green "e" button near the power switch) and adjust the "LCD Brightness" slider all the way to the right.

The next step is to adjust the Avivo color control on the X1600:

1. Open the Catalyst Control center (double-click the ATI icon in the notification tray, or right-click on the desktop and select it from the context menu).

2. Expand "Notebook Panel Properties" on the left tree, and select "Avivo Color".

3. Adjust the "Saturation" slider to the right until you find the setting the turns you on best.. Mine is currently set to 176.

After these steps, your screen should be about 400% brighter than when you first powered it up!

Other Adjustments:

The machine ships with the font DPI jacked up - this totally messes up a very large portion of programs. Here's this fix:

1. Open "Display Properties", Click the "Settings" tab, then the "Advanced" button.

2. In the "General" tab, select "Normal Size (96 DPI)" from the drop-down list and OK your way out.

Last but not least, if your screen looks "fuzzy" there's a good chance you're running the screen at the wrong resolution. As LCD's have a fixed number of pixels, there's only ever *one* resolution that can ever look right. In the case of the 8204 it's 1680 by 1050 pixels - set it to anything else and it will get ugly.. Such is the nature of all LCD's.

To fix this, open "Display Properties", click the "Settings" tab, and adjuste the Screen Resolution slider to 1680 by 1050 and OK your way out.

If your 8204's screen still doesn't look good after all of this, there's a chance you've got a defective screen, take it back!

I have attached a couple of snapshots of my 8204 in full sunlight, though they are pretty poor quality (have yet to install my DVcam software). If you're experiencing problems with your screen, could you upload a photo here so we all can see? In the meantime I'll see if I can't get a better pic myself.

 

Good stuff, Matey!