DISPLAY RESOLUTION/SYSTEM.INI PROBLEM

First a couple of real short lessons here:

Screen resolution: the number of pixels that can be displayed on the screen. Screen resolution is shown as 2 numbers (i.e. 600 x 480, 1024 x 768). The bigger the numbers, the higher the resolution.Color Quality (or color depth): this is the number of different colors that can appear on the screen. This is shown either as number of colors (i.e. 16 colors, 256 colors) or number of bits (i.e. 16-bit, 24-bit). Acutally, the bit notation is just a shortcut for showing number of colors. (16-bit = @65,000 colors; 24-bit = @16 million colors).

Both screen resolution and color quality are a function of the video card installed and the video driver installed. A video card using a generic driver will not function to its full potential.

From the sound of it, you ended installing a generic video driver to get the computer working properly again. I would suspect the your friend is actually stuch wit something like a resolution of 600 x 480 at a color depth of 16 colors. This is a default of most generic video drivers. If this is the actual situation, you (or your friend) need to dowload and install the latest drivers (either form the card manufacturer's website or from a site like www.drivershq.com) for the particular video card installed.

If you actually do already have the proper drivers installed, and your friend really does mean 16-bit, that is a function of that card's capabilities and can't be changed.

Hope this helps.

Tim's answer is correct and note that he said Video card drivers and not Monitor drivers. Your monitor is fine, but the video card is loaded as a standard VGA card and needs to have the latest drivers installed. Usually the video card model numberand BIOS version displays along the top of the screen when the system boots up--it's very quick and sometimes you have to boot a few times to see it. If you do not have the documentation for this system, other than opening the case to see what video card is installed, this is how you would find out what adapter is there.

Next, you would visit the site of the manufacturer to get or download the latest driver for that specific card and whatever operating system you have (95, 98, NT, 2000, XP). Make sure that you get the matching OS drivers for your adapter.

If unable to locate drivers at the manufacturer's site, there are several sites that offer free drivers for download:

http://www.drivershq.com/

http://www.mrdriver.com/

http://www.driversplanet.com/

http://www.driverguide.com/

http://www.driverzone.com/

http://www.pacosdrivers.com/

There are no spaces in the URLs. Hope this helps.

When you created th new system.ini file the video settings are set to 16 colors.
There's a line in the boot section of the file that says,

"display.drv=vga.drv"

You may be able to get away with switching it back without reinstalling the video driver.

run sysedit.exe go to "system.ini" in the boot section find "display.drv=vga.drv" change that line to "display.drv=pnpdrvr.drv" if your video drivers haven't been changed it will go back to the former settings.