I am troubleshooting a problem for a friend who has a Dell laptop running XP Home edition. She is a local administrator on the laptop. When we attempt to change any display settings (resolution, dpi, etc.) they change but revert back to their original settings when we reboot. This things killing me. Thanks in advance for any help
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XP Home Edition Won't Save Display Settings
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gargouille
IS-IT--Management
Make sure you have the right display drivers...tried any of the native XP troubleshooters?
What make and model is it?
Just some general information.
Tip: Easy on the Eyes
So you bought an XP notebook with a large display and a native screen resolution of 1400 by 1050 pixels or higher. The problem is, the icons and text look tiny. And if you switch to another resolution, everything looks bigger--but fuzzier.
Solution: Leave the screen in its native resolution. Right-click the desktop and select Properties from the shortcut menu to open the Display Properties dialog box. Click the Settings tab, and then click the Advanced button to open your monitor and graphics controller Properties dialog box. On its General tab, click the entry in the DPI Setting field to open that drop-down list, then click Custom Setting to open the Custom DPI Setting dialog box, where you can increase the size of the images that Windows displays. If the text is still too small, select the Appearance tab in the Display Properties dialog box and increase the font size (the Advanced button lets you set the font size for individual Windows elements).
You can also magnify the text in Word, Excel, and other Office documents for easier reading by selecting Zoom from the View menu.
Just some general information.
Tip: Easy on the Eyes
So you bought an XP notebook with a large display and a native screen resolution of 1400 by 1050 pixels or higher. The problem is, the icons and text look tiny. And if you switch to another resolution, everything looks bigger--but fuzzier.
Solution: Leave the screen in its native resolution. Right-click the desktop and select Properties from the shortcut menu to open the Display Properties dialog box. Click the Settings tab, and then click the Advanced button to open your monitor and graphics controller Properties dialog box. On its General tab, click the entry in the DPI Setting field to open that drop-down list, then click Custom Setting to open the Custom DPI Setting dialog box, where you can increase the size of the images that Windows displays. If the text is still too small, select the Appearance tab in the Display Properties dialog box and increase the font size (the Advanced button lets you set the font size for individual Windows elements).
You can also magnify the text in Word, Excel, and other Office documents for easier reading by selecting Zoom from the View menu.
If the drivers for the display are not exactly correct, it may be resetting back to 800x600x16bit color on each reboot. If it starts out in 640x480, then the video driver is not working at ALL, and it could be using a generic SVGA driver, which starts out in 640x480, but allows to you set it higher, until you reboot then it goes back to 640x480. Check the display adapter in the device manager. Try removing/uninstall it, and restart Windows. It may re-install it fine upon restart.
BuckeyeComputers
Technical User
I was having the same problem, would reset the display settings and reboot and they would reset back, the solution for me was a program causing this situation ( eartlink access manager) disable the program and display went back to normal. disable any unneeded startup programs and see if this helps
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