The vast majority of 9 and 10 inch netbooks with Intel Atom chips and GMA 950 graphics have the same native screen resolution: 1024 x 600 pixels. While that’s generally good enough to view most web pages, some web content doesn’t really fit on a display that small. And some programs won’t even run if you don’t have a 1024 x 768 pixel or higher resolution display.
Asus offers software on its Eee PC netbooks that lets you virtually turn the screen into a 1024 x 768 pixel display in one of two ways. You can choose one mode that will let you slide up and down to see the bottom or top of the screen. Or you can emulate a 1024 x 768 pixel screen by those extra 168 lines into a space that wasn’t really built for them. The result is that text tends to look a little funky, but at least you’ll be able to run programs that require a higher resolution display.
Now it looks like there’s a way to increase the virtual display resolution without using the Asus software. Netbook News reports that there’s a new Windows 7 driver for netbooks with GMA 950 graphics that lets you adjust the screen resolution to 1182 x 864 pixels.
Bear in mind, this doesn’t actually increase the number of pixels that your netbook can natively display. And that means that increasing the resolution will effectively make text and images on your netbook look kind of crappy. But if you absolutely need to be able to squeeze more content onto your screen, it could come in handy.
You can check out a video demo from Netbook News after the break.
You can download the GMA 950 Windows 7 driver version 8.15.10.1912
here.
