Sorta like 800 x 600 on 19 in WS

Hello everyone,

I have a pretty simple question I need help on to help out my 68 year old dad.

He sets his monitor resolution to 800 x 600 because everything appears larger and he is able to read it more clearly. We all know that web apps are moving away from that standard and albeit he is bright on most things the scroll bars are not one of them.

How would I calculate what resolution on a 19 wide screen would give him similar "appearance" to what he sees on his 800 x 600 now? (oh yeah, that 8 x 6 is on a standard 17".... one crt, one lcd dual setup.)

Thanks all for the help, his b-day is coming up and I'd like to replace his old crt with 19 ws if I can figure this out


ps, sorry to put this in the GF section but I don't know how to move it now

Ermmm...I would assume it would just be best to change the resolutions and see which one is the best for him.

Thanks rolli --- 22's are probably out of my price range but I might be able to get some help on that. I'll check to see what resolutions are supported on the 19's

1) Get your pa the best LCD you can afford. If you look around, 22" 1680x1050 LCDs can be found for near $200. Work your black Friday.

2) Run it at it's native resolution.

3) Change your default fonts to a Large or Extra Large Font Set/Large Icons/ Clear Type Smoothing (I personally don't like CTS)

4) Teach you Pa how to use the ctrl-mouse wheel page zoom. IE7 works best without a doubt. I think Opera is also good. This is the one thing FireFox sucks at, Zooming! You can download "No Squint" but it doesn't work as well. They promised to fix this in FireFox3. If he uses applications like Word, etc. Teach him how to zoom in each of the applicatinos. (Microsoft Word uses the same ctrl-mw zoom.)

5) Give him a shortcut to the magnifier if he still needs it.

If you have IE 7 installed look at the lower right corner and there is a pull down to let him adjust the magnification. It should go from 50 to 400 percent along with a custom option at the bottom of the pull down menu. I am running Vista but I do not think it is Vista specific. For XP or Vista right clicking on the desktop should lead you to an option to change font size for everything else from 96dpi to 120dpi. For Vista it is in the upper left corner of personalize and for XP it is someplace on one of the theme pages. On 22 inch native LCD's quite a few of us old guys have to change a few things because of native resolutions so I can imagine the same would be true on a CRT. Unfortunately 1024 is becoming the normal even for software not just the web.

Wish dear old Dad luck.

Edit: Oh if you do teach him how to use ctrl-mw then also teach him about mousewheel click to get the all points scroll turned on so that the elevator bars don't drive him nuts.

After doing some research. FireFox add on MouseZoom works kind of well. A little confusing with the hold right mouse + mouse wheel interface, but I like it. Allows me to lean back in my chair and still read really small text without killing the format of the page. You may have to reload some pages to get it to look right.

Another thing you could do that might help him is use large icons on the desktop, in control panel->display properties.