Any way to set DPI lower than 96?

Hi there,

I'm trying to adjust my DPI in Windows Vista to fit more stuff on the screen; I have only a WXGA 1280x800 display, and I want to get as much space out of it as I can, without buying a WUXGA 1920x1200 display and retrofitting it into my frame.

As far as I can tell, though, the DPI scaling utility only allows me to make things bigger, not smaller. Is there any way to adjust the DPI to shrink everything, rather than make it all bigger? Or failing that, is there any way to accomplish that besides DPI?

Thanks in advance.

 

what are you trying to accomplish exactly? What do you mean by "more space"?

 

He's essentially trying to increase his resolution by lowering his DPI, in order to have more screen estate.

 

^Exactly. The Vista DPI setting is set to 96 DPI by default, which is 100% size. The only options are to increase the DPI, which makes everything larger, and effectively gives me less space. What I want is a way to make everything smaller, so I can fit more onto the screen at once.

 

Why not just increase the screen resolution? Also, in Vista and Windows 7, I believe you can zoom in and out for most windows.

 

My screen resolution is at its maximum setting, but unfortunately that's only 1280x800.

 

You can set your screen resolution higher than the native resolution if you want. So, you can very easily set your screen resolution to 1900x1200 if you wanted.

 

And how would I go about doing that?

 

My fiancé uses an external display when he needs to fit more stuff when he works on his 13.3 " notebook.

If your screen supports only 1280x800, you cannot increase it to 1900x1200 as far as I know of.

 

An excellent idea, but unfortunately my notebook is used on the go, and carrying around my 20" ViewSonic 1680x1050 display plus power adapter is just not the most convenient thing.

That's what I thought when I read that...I'd like to hear jackluo923's explanation of this.

 

I'm all ears, too! The only real drawback to this new _HP system is the lousy resolution (what doofus thought that a 1440 x 900 res screen was the "perfect" match for a 17" system with a decent dedicated GPU?) so I'd love to hear of a solution that would let me "rise" above that, if you'll pardon the pun .

 

http://acerious.wordpress.com/2009/...ndows-hacking-registry-for-lower-dpi-than-96/

 

I think it depends on the graphics cards and drivers whether your resolution can higher than native.

I think one of ourt old laptops -1280*800 can be set to a higher resolution...
Its close to 5 years old and has some mobile Ati card, 9700 or someting like that.

I haven't seen that ability in Intel cards though - without an external display of higher resolution.

However, the drawback is that you just see part of your actual desktop - its like looking at the world through the viewfinder of a camera (no fishexe lense) you see a part of the world, but never everything in one go.