Wills Consulting LLC

I just took a new Inspiron 9400 out of the box which has a beautiful widescreen 17-inch display with a native resolution of 1920x1200. Unfortunately, nothing on the web looks beautiful, because Dell shipped the machine with screwy display settings. All images in Internet Explorer 6+ look distorted.

This is because Internet Explorer tries to scale images when it detects a non-standard DPI setting. The standard is 96dpi. Dell ships with 120dpi. There is a registry key that disables the automatic image scaling. However, my preferred solution is simply to change back to 96dpi and then enable large fonts.

Many applications end up behaving poorly in 120dpi. I am really suprised that Dell ships notebooks with this configuration, because I imagine that the vast majority of its customers don't know why their images look 'blurry', or how to fix it.