Compaq M300 display thing

[Calum]

hello.

this is a hardware question, but i thought i'd ask here just in case.
don't worry, i'm not expecting people to know the answer but you never know...

well i have a compaq m300 laptop, and it has an
ATI RAGE LT Pro, 4MB of SGRAM graphics card i think. (from here) and i installed slack no bother on it. last week, i don't know what i did but when in text mode (like if i ctrl-alt-f1) it displays the contents of the screen smaller in the centre of the screen instead of filling up the whole screen. With X running it still fills the whole screen, but i'd like it to do this in text mode too. and it was doing it till last week too. at the same time, my grub menu started doing the same thing (smaller in the middle of the screen) and i installed mswindows today (don't ask, its long and boring and relates to audio support) and it also does this thing of having a small screen in the middle of the real screen.

i googled for it but have found nothing even though i have seen this happening on other compaq m300s and n400s at work (with win2k and winxp) although when the OS is fully installed plus drivers at work, they always come out with proper full screen stuff.

any idea what's going on?
just curious really. i expect an OS reinstall would fix it but this seems a bit drastic to me.

[Void Main]

Heh heh, I have a Compaq laptop too and the same thing happened to me. It took me a little while to realize that I had pressed the "Fn"+"t" key combo. The "Fn" key being the special compaq function key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard. I have an Armada E500 but I'll bet that's the same thing that happened to you.

[Calum]

really? bizarre! because i thought it had to be a BIOS thing, and i looked in there for a setting but to no avail. so i went for broke and selected the "reset BIOS to defaults" thing, then reset the boot order (which is the only thing i have different from the defaults anyway) and hey presto it now works fine!

odd.

[Void Main]

So are you saying that resetting the BIOS fixed it or the "Fn"+"t" fixed it? I think it could go either way reading your message. I'm just interested if it's specific to my model of if it's the same on yours.

[Calum]

well i didn't try the Fn-t thing because the BIOS reset thing had fixed it, so i can't really confirm if Fn-t would have done the trick or not.

[Void Main]

Sure you can. Just press "Fn"+"t" in a virtual terminal. If it shrinks your screen, press it again. :)

[Calum]

hey! it did do that too! well, i never, i never realised this problem was actually a "feature"! how could this be useful? also how come in idiotically-tiny mode, some screens are smaller than others? (eg the mandrake install screen is small too, but not as small as the normal screen in slack) me confused!

[Void Main]

I think it has to do with the limitations of the LCD display but I could be wrong. The lower resolutions have to be "stretched" to fit the screen height/width and sometimes it makes things unreadable and choppy so if you press the Fn+t it will be smaller but possibly legible. At least that is the only thing I can figure. Unless it's for different types of LCD screens...

[Calum]

which would be bizarre because you would think there'd only be one kind of lcd screen that would fit in an m300. there can't be many 12" screens with a 1024 px resolution i wouldn't have thought, and probably only one would go in this particular model of laptop anyway...

[Void Main]

Here it is in a FAQ:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/techp ... n5kwp.html

I still believe it appears that this is a limitation of the LCD type display. It is only capable of one resolution and Linux virtual consoles and DOS screens are the equivalent of 640x480 so when they are displayed they show only fill 640 pixels accross by 480 pixels down in the center of a 800x600 pixel (or 1024x768) display, depending on what you have. So the Fn+t is a BIOS trick to stretch that out across all the pixels, and loses quality in the process (like a digital zoom vs optical zoom on a digital camera). I'm not sure if this is the exact answer but I believe it is along the right lines.

[Calum]

oh i understand now, thanks!