I just added a new monitor. 19" widescreen. Why is the image stretched on it. The res is correct in propertie

Question

I've updated the nvidia 5200 ultra video driver. The display is set to 1440x900, which matches the monitor, so it shoudln't be stretched. Do I need to upgrade my video card for this?

Answer 1

Hiya anon,

The thing is, I resisted the upgrade to widescreen LCD because I do major graphic/web design work. I gave in due to lack of space and I purchased 2 Viewsonic 19" widescreen LCD, and 1 PNY NVidia based GeForce FX 5200 PCI adapter with dual port VGA and S-Video outputs.

After installing things looked like crap no matter how I adjusted the monitors or display settings. Then I went against my better judgment and installed NVidia's "Latest" XP drivers for the 5200. What a freaking mistake!!! After some research I found that for some NVidia chipsets, the latest drivers are not the best drivers. The driver was unstable under high load conditions and the NVidia Desktop program sucked memory. Every 2 or 3 reboots the screen resolution would change from 1440 x 900 to 1024 x 768. I finally solved the problems by installing an earlier version XP driver from 2005. Most of the problems went away but I still had to totally change my Windows appearance in display properties, such as text, borders, menus etc..

SUGGESTIONS:
*Use the "Center" option instead of the "Stretch" option for your wallpaper.
*Customize the advanced settings in the display properties "Appearance" tab individually until you have something that looks comfortable to you. If you just changed the resolution to 1440 x 900 then many things are now too long or too small.
*If you are having other weird issues, it may be that really great display driver, consider doing a downgrade which helped me and many others since.

And finally, NO, you don't need to upgrade your video adapter, unless you want to; I like ATI.

GOOD LUCK !!

Answer 2

If you display a non 16:10 aspect ratio picture stretched to fill the screen then it has to get distorted to fit the screen's 16:10 aspect ratio.

For a desktop background, crop the picture to 1440 by 900, or at least a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Fro viewing pictures, either do not maximize the window and let it conform to the aspect ratio of the picture, or use an application that does not automatically scale the picture to fill the window.