Long story short: I am dissatisfied with my 1366x768 screen size. I know I could have gotten a 1920x1080 laptop screen if I splurged some more, but, "Full HD" laptop screens generally come on models that cost a ton, and I wanted to purchase a relatively inexpensive computer so I settled on one with a small display resolution. I didn't think it would be a big problem, but now that I actually have the computer, I feel extremely restricted by the low pixel count.

This reminded me of a fairly big issue that I have noticed with many application GUIs: most buttons are too large for my liking. While the large GUI elements are justified for accessibility reasons, I can personally move my mouse with pixel accuracy from any point of the screen to another nearly instantaneously, so the huge buttons, icons, etc. are more of a hindrance to me than anything, especially when they take up several tens of rows in the valuable few pixels available to me on this monitor.

So I thought of this solution: Why not emulate a 2732x1536 virtual screen size, and have a display driver average the samples to display a downscaled version of that screen on my current 1366x768 screen? Averaging the samples provides an antialiasing effect (and it would be an integer multiple), so the perceived resolution and quality would actually be a good deal higher than 1366x768, not to mention giving me four times as much desktop space to work with.

Unfortunately, I found absolutely no mention of anything capable of doing this after a good deal of time spent searching. Does anyone here on SEN know of a software solution that accomplishes what I am looking for? If you do, please post! I would very much appreciate it.

What OS are you using? On Windows, there's an option to allow your monitor to use resolutions beyond its normal maximum. Link here (it's for windows XP, but i'm fairly sure you could apply it to vista/W7).

But as far as antialiasing goes, AFAIK that's not possible. It's crappy display or bust.

Yep I'm pretty sure low resolution = low resolution and theres not a hell of a lot you can do to fix that other than buying a laptop/desktop monitor with a higher resolution.

That option is unavailable (greyed-out) for me.

Anything that does exactly what I said (render a screen 2x as large as the native resolution, then downsampling it) is basically performing antialiasing, since it takes 4 samples per pixel.

EDIT> I don't think you guys get what I mean...

Here is what my screen is like, right now:


Here is what I want it to look like:


What the "virtual screen" will look like, prior to downsizing:


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 10 2011, 5:08 am by Aristocrat.

Probably your easiest option is simply to make system fonts smaller, use smaller icons etc. You can make your task bar smaller, too.

Found this also: https://sites.google.com/site/gimespace/home/desktop-extender-edition

Just makes a virtual desktop which you have to pan around with your mouse, rather than scaling it down to fit your actual resolution. I guess you could email the creators with your idea and see if they know of any programs or whether it's possible to implement. Basically what you're requesting here is for your graphics card to render 4x as many pixels as it normally does, and then squash it onto your regular display - your graphics card simply may not be capable of doing this, even if you find a program that will let you do it. The desktop extender program renders the normal number of pixels, it just 'shuffles' what is being displayed when you pan with your mouse.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 10 2011, 6:19 am by Lanthanide.

Alternatively, you can use Dexpot. (Referred as workspaces in Linux.)

I might actually buy this, lol.

It's better than spending an extra $100 just to get 1920x1080 from the laptop manufacturer (maybe). ;o