Screens that pan

I am totally confused with this particular laptop that I saw at Costco. I beleive it was an Acer 5000, 15.4" and not sure of the vid card. Anayways, I was curious to see what the resolution would look like greater then the traditional 1280x800 and instead of making everything smaller like I expected, the only thing that happened was the screen would pan if you moved the mouse off the screen. Do all laptops do this when you up the resolution or is there somethign I did wrong.

 

I believe the screen panning is normal. I have an Acer Aspire 5002WLMi and it does the same thing for me.

 

haha, i remember when my old desktop used to do that whenever our babysitter came over, and it took us days to figure out how to turn it back. i didn't know that comps could still do that. Yeah i think thats normal, but i don't know how you would set it higher then what the screen can display...

 

So I've been looking at the Z96J and it offers 1680x1050 res. Most 15.4" laptops get up to 1280x800 so does this mean that above 1280x800, this laptop will start paning???

 

I believe so. If the LCD has a native resolution of 1280x800 then it can't display a resolution greater than that, so therefore the laptop will be panning.

Just don't put it to the maximum setting. You will see how long it takes to reach the edge of the screen.

 

Ok. I just wonder why the display setting would allow you to go greater then the native resolution, unless most people don't mind the paning.

 

It's called a virtual dimensioning. It's often used when people hook up a secondary display, and don't change to a lower res. It's useful mostly in that your screen just doesn't go black and not display anything, which would basically force you to hard shut-down in Windows. They also usually allow an overlay to show full-screen without the clipping when they do that, so if you start a video or presentation on the clipped display, it'll still show the full thing without you having to resize your display res.