Dual screen DPI just not right.

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2003
Posts
5,995
Location
Expat in the USA
Hi,

So I have a new touch screen Dell E7440 laptop, which its inbuilt screen res is 1920x1080.

Which is fine when the laptop is on its own.. Win 8.1 knows to increase the DPI, so everything looks sharp and you're not squinting cos the fonts and everything else is too small.

Throw a docking station into the mix and a Dell U2412 and things are not so simple.

The Dell U2412 is 1920x1200, and that's displaying at its correct resolution, however the laptop display is partially too small, or partially fuzzy, as the extended screen is no longer at its native resolution.

I don't want to increase the dpi, cos if i do, then everything on the U2412 looks too big, and besides at its native res of 1920x1200, without messing around with the dpi, everything is spot on.

However using the built in 1920x1080 screen, which lets face it is too high of a res, unless the dpi is larger, cos its only a 14" screen.

If I choose one scaling level for all my displays
the U2412 is good, but the E7440 touch display is way too small to read anything

If i uncheck this and let Windows 8.1 work its magic auto scaling, then the U2412 is good, but then on the E7440, its either fuzzy cos its not at its native or its too small, as in when i bring up a menu, as in right click on the desktop.

I wish there was a way to leave the U2412 as is, on its native res, then and only the E7440's built in display have its DPI larger, so that its not straining the eyes.

My old laptop, never a problem cos its native built in display was 1366 x 768, which is fine on the eyes.

The problem is this new touch screen's res is 1920 x 1080, which is waaaaay too small for a 14" laptop screen. Microsoft know this though and by default up the DPI.. However it gets messy when running dual screen.
 
I ended up reverting back to a non-touch 1366x768 E7440 laptop running Windows 7, instead of the touch E7440 running Win8.1. Much better !!! Another Win 8 fail... Not so much with the operating system, but the hardware its designed to run on, in terms of touch screen laptops, running dual screen. Though Win 7 with a high res screen would have the same problem, people most likely wouldn't go with a touch screen high res laptop, for Win7.. However anyone thinking about getting a Win8 touch laptop will be, whether they like it or not ! Really they need to take all of the above into consideration.

I'm really not sure how Microsoft can get around the problem. Problem is any laptop they ship that has a touch is always going to be a high res screen, but for business users, who work off two screens, with typically a larger 24" as the main screen, this is a bit of a problem.

You can play around with the disabling the display upscale on high DPI settings and then playing around with the individual zoom of the browsers to sort of make it work, just as long as you commit one app to a certain screen.. As soon as you want to move it over to a different screen, then the problem is back.

I'll just keep this touch laptop as a laptop to not ever be docked on a dual display, then it'll be fine.

But for dual screen users, then non-touch is the better option.. For me at least.
 
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