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Adjustable overscan option

Stretch wallpaper to edges of screen
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Sometimes it can be nice to have a monitor adjusted so the image completely fills the screen with a little overscan. This can avoid a black boundary around the wallpaper image. Unfortunately, adjusting a monitor in this fashion will cause parts of the taskbar to be cut off. When applications are maximized, parts of their title bar and right-side scroll bar will be cut off as well.

My proposal would be an adjustment to tell Windows that it should report the usable screen area as being slightly smaller (by an adjustable amount) than the full screen size. For example, one could set a display resolution of 1056x800 with a 16-pixel boundary around the edges. This would look like a 1024x768 display, except that the wallpaper would extend out to the edges of the screen. Further, windows could be manually moved out to the screen edges, but would not go there when using the maximize control.

Some applications like slide shows might want to use the whole screen; they'd be allowed to do so if they knew what they were doing.

supercat, Apr 19 2006

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       Not exactly getting what the problem is here.   

       You can already stretch wallpaper to fill the screen. You can set the taskbar(s) to automatically hide when not in use. I usually have my picture adjusted to completely fill the screen (i.e., no black edges).
DrCurry, Apr 19 2006
  

       I also fail to see what the issue is. It sounds to me like you simply have a mis-adjusted monitor.   

       From what I've seen, this is rather common. I often notice co-workers' screens with unsused screen space. One even had a 1.5" border all around. What good is having a 21" monitor if you're only going to use 18 inches of it?   

       Find your screen controls for horizontal and vertical size and position and play with them until everything fits. You may have to fiddle with keystone, trapezoid, pillow, hook and rotation as well. Don't be afraid, you won't break anything.   

       I hate using a mis-adjusted monitor.
Freefall, Apr 20 2006
  

       Some monitors have rounded corners, probably including supercat's. Either that or the very edges are only visible from limited angles. I'm using one like that now. There's what looks like a bit less than a centimetre between the front of the glass and the phosphors, so you can look around the plastic cover to see more screen.   

       You don't want vital information there, but you might not want it left black either.
caspian, Apr 20 2006
  

       Baked. Commodore 64.   

       You know, POKE 53280,0 and POKE 53281,0 and all.   

       Seriously, though, it sounds like what you want here is to be able to tell Windows to place it's widgets within a subset of the entire raster, so you can have a few pixels of waste around the edges. In my experience, given a decent monitor, I have never had a problem adjusting the screen boundaries to fall just to the edge of the available screen, and this is totally irrelevant with LCD monitors.
JakePatterson, Apr 20 2006
  

       I don't think you are understanding what s/he is describing. I think s/he wants the wallpaper area to be a superset of the useable area. So that the toolbar is a few millimeters in from the bottom edge (or is it the top edge, I don't use windows) with a scrap of the desktop background showing. Then the same at the edges and top. Program display windows can only be drawn to within a couple millimeters of the edge, then do whatever windows does when you reach the edge of the screen, (stop, slide UNDER the little bit of desktop there, slip to a secondary screen, whatever)   

       So if you had a background of 200 rows of 250 little smilely faces each, the top and bottom row would always be visible, and the first and last smiley on each row would also be visible. Sort of a frame.   

       Oh, but I still think this should be M-F-D, as it isn't really an invention, just a product suggestion. Perhaps sending it to Microsoft would be a better choice.
Galbinus_Caeli, Apr 20 2006
  

       Caspian seems to understand the idea and reason behind it. The issue is not one of usable area so much as aesthetics. The black area around the visible screen is not large, and does not represent a particular loss of screen real-estate, but it would be more aesthetically pleasing if the wallpaper extended cleanly out to the screen border. Not meaningful with LCD monitors, nor with monitors whose phosphor doesn't extend all the way out to the bezel, but it would be meaningful and useful with some monitors, including the one in front of me right now.   

       BTW, the mouse could be confined to move within the active (non-overscan) screen area to avoid the issues Ian Tindale describes.   

       As for the C64, I was pondering the fact that earlier computers allowed setting the overscan color, and current ones do not, and thinking that while there is far less overscan area (probably about 1% instead of about 10%) it would still be nice aesthetically to put something there. Same basic concept as full-bleed printing.
supercat, Apr 20 2006
  

       With you on this one [supercat]. I often have to cut pc images into video recordings (in fact I have just been doing exactly that) and you are often left to choose between a black border that you don't want or cutting off the corners of the image. Even being able to fill the excess space with a single colour would be an improvement.
wagster, Apr 20 2006
  


 

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