Kobi Pinhasov

Recently I’ve purchased the HP 22-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor and I absolutely love it.

I’ve plugged it to my ThinkPad X61 and the process of connecting was very simple and straightforward.

To set up the appearance of your displays perform the following steps:

• Right click on mouse on any empty area of the desktop
• From the menu list choose the Screen Resolution option (see below)     

Alternatively you can navigate to Control Panel –> Appearance and Personalization –> Adjust Screen Resolution.

Ether way you will end up in the following window.

Display

List all available and detected monitors

Resolution

Provides you with a very cool slider to adjust preferred screen resolution. It also shows the recommended and optimal settings for your monitors.

Orientation

You can choose between Landscape and Portrait (and Flipped version for each one).

Multiple displays

You can duplicate, extend or choose to display only on one specific monitor.

I’ve decided to extend my desktop on both monitors. The main desktop area (with the taskbar) will be shown on the big monitor and the rest will be extended to the laptop screen. However I’ve tried to find out how to specify the location of the monitors relatively to each other – whether my laptop located on the right or the left side of the big monitor. This is important and convenient way to use mouse when you move windows to the secondary extended monitor – it feels more natural. For example, if your laptop is on the right side of your monitor so it will be more natural to move window to your right side and vice versa.

Windows 7 let’s you adjust this option and even more !

At the window above, you can drag any monitor and drop at the exact location relatively to another one. Not only you can set the sides of both displays (which one is at right or left side) but also the vertical position of each one. For example, my laptop is located a little bit below the main monitor so I’ve used the above window to let Windows know its approximate location. I guess this setting is used later when you move windows to the extended area and it will be shown in a more accurate and precise way.

I’ve been using Windows 7 since it’s early release and I’m very pleased to see all these improvements and features.