Desktop

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Can't change screen resolution

0 helpful
2 replies

by shanghai sam

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Hi. First of all, you should know that I've been having some recurring problems with bad sectors on my hard disk as well as system hangs/application crashes. These may have something to do with the problem I'm about to describe.

I'm using Win98 SE. A few days ago, the OS hung on me. Even after leaving the pc for about 45 min, nothing had changed. CTRL-Alt-Del was ineffective so I simply pressed the reset button. As expected, Scandisk ran but on entering windows, the screen display suddenly became HUGE. I had not changed the screen resolution, which had been set to the one below 1024 (640x800, is it?).

Suspecting that the resolution had somehow been reset, I went into desktop properties (settings tab) in an attempt to correct the problem. However, the desktop image shown in the dialog was so large that, even after dragging the dialog as far up as possible, I still could not see below this image (where the settings info is). I even tried moving the entire screen image by experimenting with the manual VDU settings, but this did not allow me to see past the large desktop image in the properties dialog.

I checked Microsoft's support page for tips but the only thing that looked promising was a keystroke (CTRL+S) used to reformat and resize the Volume Control window. Of course, this did not work with Desktop properties.

Needless to say, continued use of my pc has been somewhat challenging due to the inability to see screens properly. Does anyone know of an alternative way to change screen resolution settings? If not, what can I do?

2 replies

by fbpettis

try booting into safe mode. check to see if your monitor driver and video card driver are correct under system settings. You could also try deleting their profiles from there and rebooting. The system should recognize them correctly on reboot.Another thing you might try since you have been having crash problems is reinstalling windows 98 over the top of this installation. It might be possible that on the system hang and reboot, that you lost some chunk of info. With bad sectors it might be time to get a new hard drive. Or at least back up crucial info and format c:

by vh_s

Enter safe mode by pressing F8 or pressing CTRL during boot-up.

If you still have the VGA driver, reset the VGA to the usual Generic VGA driver with 640x480 resolution 16 colors.

Reset / restart.

Start normally and install the correct VGA driver.

vh_s

This discussion is closed to new replies.