Just a quick post in between
As promised I’m still working on my XenoCode post to followup on Mark’s VMware bash
.
I noticed messing around/coding/working etc all the time on my work laptop was killing my back, so I decided to buy 2 20” tft screens (Dell S2009W) and a docking station for my laptop so I would have a decent workplace @ home. Pretty much fun, untill I discovered that the monitors native resolution (1600×900) wasn’t supported by my laptops graphic card (Intel 945 Express, Intel GMA 950 chip)… Hmm that was a real bummer…. after googling around I found this post talking about how to enable custom resolution on Intel graphics… But that looked mighty complicated at first and I didn’t want to bother…
After 2 days working on non-native resolution I decided I had to fix this, so I started again… this time I discovered the DTD Calculator
Basically what it comes down to:
- Get your monitor info using MonInfo (make sure you have your external monitor attached, otherwise MonInfo will only report back data from your internal display, also make sure you selected your external monitor in MonInfo, you can see that quick enough if you look at Standard Timings Supported)
- Paste your RAW DATA in the DTD Calculator tool on the Interpret EDID tab.
- NOTE: Make sure you’re running DTD Calculator as an administrator on Windows Vista / Windows 7. Otherwise the tool won’t be able to edit the registry!
- Press Interpret DTD
- Double click the DTD in the right side column.
- Go to Reverse calculation press reverse calculation
- Go to the Registry Hack tab
- Press the More button
- Press Get Calculated
- Press Create Modeline
- Press Write DTDs to Registry
- The program prompts you to reboot your computer, do this and presto! You can select your monitor’s native resolution after rebooting the machine
IMPORTANT: Sometimes it can happen that the DTD you get for your monitors native resolution just won’t work on your system, even with this hack…
If the DTD data is correct in the registry but the resolution is still not available, it’s a pretty good bet it’s forbidden in the BIOS. How do we get around this? We cheat! The BIOS contains the Mode Removal Table, and it has entries like “1600×900, 60Hz” and “1400×1000, 50Hz”. But it doesn’t say anything about 1599×900, or 1399×1000, so those are allowed. (Muahahahaha! Can you feel the evil power you wield as we bypass this silly restriction?) Ridiculous, really, and you’ll lose 1 pixel on the side of your screen… who cares!
For more detailed information about calculating the DTDs and lowering a it by a pixel, please visit this page
For all you lazy people out there (like me
) here is the right DTD for the Dell S2009W monitor (1599×600@60Hz):
2F 26 3F A1 60 84 1A 30 30 20 35 00 BB F9 10 00 00 1A
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