Old Hardware Rant

[Jeremy Fowler]

Here's a link to that utility:

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm

Forgot to post it earlier...

-----Original Message-----
From: Duston, Hal [mailto:hdusto01 at sprintspectrum.com]
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 12:31 PM
To: KCLUG (E-mail)
Subject: RE: Old Hardware Rant

Jonathan,

Another way to attempt to get some info is to find out the "real" 
manufacturer.  Which is probably _not_ some no-name co.  Use 
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/fccid/ and enter the FCC id which is required 
by law to be present on the monitor, and that should tell you who 
really made your monitor.  Or you could try what Jeremy Fowler 
suggested, although I was unaware of that utility.   I do know that 
MS does have a _huge_ database of what amounts to mode lines in W98.  
They are in the monitor*.inf (or some such similarly named) files 
I think.

Hal Duston
Application Developer
913-906-4490

Jonathan Hutchins [hutchins at therune.com]
> 
> > ... 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.