Hi All I thought I'd do the most recently suggested thing and update my video card drivers. It's a crusty old thing but I'm saving my pennies for a new machine (just got a laptop actually that is more powerful than this desktop... :) ). The drivers were from 2001 when I bought this thing. Ooohhhh seems to be the only thing I have never updated. Problem is, once I did I got "fuzzy" text on my monitor. I tried fiddling with the settings and it seems that anything lower than Max resolution i get fuzzy text. Max res is 1280x1024. This makes things a tad small for me (with my vision impairment). Was just wondering if anyone else had this trouble? And if so if they had a fix for the problem?

Are you using a TFT screen by any chance? TFTs will always be fuzzy when they're not being used at their native resolution.

If your resolution is 1280*1024, I guess you have a lcd monitor. If you go lower than the max resolution on a lcd monitor, things tend to get "smoothed". Maybe you could try to activate "cleartype" in your display properties, but I don't know if it will really help. Anyway... using a resolution of less than 1280 on a lcd will always have two side effects : blurring the picture and distorting it. Maybe you should try to stick to that resolution.

Ok well that wasn't quite what I wanted to hear :( Yeah I'm running a 17" LCD/TFT from Samsung (Syncmaster 171S). Originally since I bought the monitor/computer I had it running at 800x600 and it worked fine. I recently moved it up to 1024x768 before updating the vid card driver and had no issues either. Clear type is on and doesn't help unfortunately. Weird that this should suddenly start occuring after updating the driver.

Being a techy guy I had this problem come in on our helpdesk recently. The lady in question had had a new laptop but her screen had gone all blurry, even though it was running in native resolution. I fixed this by going into the options on the screen and hitting autosetup, 2 secs later it was as clear as somethign really really clear. Hope that helps. John

Isn't that like a very old video card to begin with. 2 years ago I purchased a GeForce 4.

Yes I bought this computer about 4 years ago. I have not updated the graphics card since I bought it having only updated the RAM to 756MB. Being a disabled pensioner I can't afford to have cutting edge technology unfortunately. It took me 3 years to save up for the laptop I just bought :) (which is far better than this system :) ). I seem to have fixed it by running the screen calibration utility in the NVidia dialog though.

Cool :) glad you managed to fix it

ClearType or no, you'll get the sharpest image using the native resolution of that flatscreen. So normally I'd recommend setting it at 1280x1024 - and then tell Windows to use larger fonts (Display properties, Appearance tab under Windows XP). Unfortunately many applications choose to ignore the Windows settings and apply their own ideas. Poser is one of those apps that overrule the Windows settings. So in your case it's not a good idea. If the only apps you were using were "well-behaved" Windows apps though...

LCD screens are pixel based and have their optimal resolutions set based on the size of the monitor. I have a Dell Inspiron. I forgot how big the monitor is.... it could be 17". Anyway, the resolution was set high like yours and I couldn't read the text without having to practically have my nose on the screen, lol I found a site online that explained native resolution and gave a formula to work with in order to find other settings that work without obliterating the appearance of the images/text. I settled on 1400x1050 which works well enough for me for both text and images. When I'm working with graphics, I magnify the area I need to see better and work on it that way. I tried looking for the site that had the formula, but I seem to have deleted it from my bookmarks and can't find it again.

And there u have my problem svdl. In a nutshell not every Windows Program utilises the Windows Appearance setting. Poser uses xml and I know how to change a few of the font sizes under it but it only ends up ruining the image based interface (you can increase the font size on the Properties dialog palette but they end up running into the and under the dials). The Syncmaster is not an LCD monitor. It is flat panel. If you run the screen calibrater there is a part that lets you adjust the monitor in the NVIdia Dialog box (I can't remember where it was) but it comes up with a bunch of colours etc and some text telling you to manually adjust the monitor or use it's auto adjust feature. Hitting auto adjust seems to have fixed it (oddly though I don't know what changing screen resolution would have to do with this).

I'm using a CRT monitor, so this isn't particularly helpful, but I had to re-build a big chunk of my set-up recently. Luckily my Poser stuff was on a seperate physical drive. Anyway, I was running at a standard 1024x768, and now I'm running at 1280x1024. Things seem sharper and more readable, even in Poser. Which seems weird, but there can be effects on the stroke-widths, when 1-pixel wide at the lower resolution is shown at 2-pixels wide at the higher. And the individual phosphor dots on a CRT monitor don't change size. I've just has a close look with a magnifier, and it looks as though the phosphor dots better fit the logical pixels, which sharpens the edges. So CRT and LCD aren't so different. But my eyes aren't yours.

Trust me, you don't want mine :) I use 6x magnifiers lenses to read the monitor (blind in one eye). Clarity is definitely better at higher resolutions but at too high a resolution I can't read them due to the size.