Old Hardware Rant

[Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster]

> ... you should be able to find the sync rates for the monitor from
> the manufacturer's website.

The "manufacturer" in this case is some company that made a short run of
silk-screened bezels and UL stickers and shopped everything else out to a
local assembly house in the far east.  I'm certain there's no web site.
There are people who could figure out the actual assembler from examining
the circuit boards, but I'm not one of them.

I've had this problem a lot - while certain common, NON-CHEAP monitors are
in the databases, I seem to end up with the ones that are either a different
model or an unknown brand.  If I spend a few days diddling the config file,
I can get 600x300 with 13 colors (and a default desktop of 12,437 x 10,694)
or something useful like that.  Even with NEC and Compaq monitors, I often
can't get the resolution in X that I can in '95.

Clearly Microsoft isn't relying on a Manufacturer/Model table when they set
up monitors in 9x.  They get GUI mode every time, and any monitor that isn't
a ghosted-out dinosaur will at least go 800x600x24 or better.  Most will do
1024x768x16, though you won't want to.  Setting the monitor type to
"Plug-and-Play" will almost always get a decent display, which suggests that
the installers for X are missing a piece of info that is often right there
for the asking.