page size

I just bought a new sony laptop fw351 which has a 16:9 screen.

I have an older sony 15.4" and even though the new computer has a bigger and wider screen, the pages in the 16:9 are narrower and smaller. They occupy less space on the screen with white borders on the sides. Can it be fixed? I tried to change screen resolution but that does not help.

 

What are the display resolutions of the two screens? From what I can see, the FW351 has a resolution of 1600x900, and that older 15.4" Sony (what model) probably has 1280x800 doesn't it.

The pages are thinner because there are more pixels horizontally than your previous notebook. It isn't a problem, and it cannot be fixed unless you lower the resolution of the screen via Display Properties. But I highly recommend you do NOT do that, because using an LCD screen at non-native resolutions will negatively affect how things appear on your screen.

Are you sure the screen resolution actually changed when you tried to do that? Because it sounds like it didn't.

 

Thanks Greg.

Does it really mean that from now on, I will have to surf on smaller pages in a bigger screen...?

Anyone, solution?

 

Just use the Zoom feature in your browser (in Explorer, it is located in the lower right hand corner -- marked 100%). Should work very well, with none of the major distortions which occur with changing screen resolution or DPI.

 

Hmmm...that might work. I believe IE7 (and up) as well as FF3.0 (and up) have really good support for proper zooming.

Why didn't I think of that .

 

Set the DPI correctly, and a page will take up exactly the same width and height as it does in meatspace. And a font will display the same size as it does in print-outs.

Only old and badly behaved programs that use a mix of pixels and real life measurements (like points) will have problems, and they're mostly circumventable.

In your case, you should set Vista to 112 DPI. Yes, 112. Not 96. Then ( after you've finished groaning about how everything is now too big) adjust the Windows icon size and font sizes to your preference, but leave the DPI alone. Repeat for programs that use their own font settings, like e.g. Firefox. Yes, it's a pain to set up initially -- it may take you the better part of an hour.

But, once you've done that, an A4 page will be as wide as an A4 page, a letter page will be as wide as a letter page, a 5 cm ruler will be 5 cm, and a 10.5 pt font will be as big as a 10.5 pt font in a book, or on any other correctly set computer running a DPI-aware GUI (like Vista or Gnome 2.2x).
I have several computers with very different monitors and resolutions, but after setting the DPI correctly on all of them, it's a breeze to jump back and forth between them. Because fonts and scalable graphics will look the same physical size on all of them. The text on this 90 dpi monitor I'm on right now looks the same size as on my 140 dpi Vaio Z. And if I hold a printer paper up to the monitor, it takes up almost exactly the same space as Word shows it should. WYSIWYG.

 

Zooming lags the browser and your whole computer, horribly. I used to zoom all the time after FF 3.0 came out, then wondered why the browser was so slow. The difference is that changing the resolution to increase size won't affect performance, whereas zooming does.

Also to add, Google Chrome's 2.0 that just released a few days ago now has support for page zoomings too (improved from text-only zoom.) It helps in performance a bit since Chrome is incredibly fast, but you can still feel the shaky performance when you zoom in a few notches.

 

Okay. I set up two FWs side-by-side, an FW190 with ATI3470 and 1600x900 resolution HiColor and an FW390 with ATI3650 and 1920x1080 resolution FullHD.

With the FW390's FullHD set to zoom to 125% the page and print size in Explorer are about the same as on the native resolution of the FW190. I did not see any noticeable change in loading time due to the set zoom -- however, when I tested zooming on the FW190 the screen would occasionally "tear" or have compressed text -- a phenomenon which only occurred on the FW390 when there was a download going on in the background. Pure browsing was uneventful, even with multiple screens open.

Additionally, the contrast and clarity of the text was slightly superior on the higher resolution FW390 -- again, even when the text was the same size as that of the lower native resolution FW190.

So, what's the source of the performance difference? Is it the video card, since the FW190's ATI3470 is of an inferior class to the FW390's ATI3650? The two machines used have exactly the same drives (SSD's) but the FW390 has a faster processor with twice the L2cache and a faster FSB, although both are Centrino2s.

So, when a _noticeable_ degradation in performance occurs, I am not sure it can be easily attributed _just_ to using the zoom feature -- It would seem that too many influencing variables are in play.