Dell Inspiron Notebook

Reinstalling windows I ended up with a small screen on my laptop. It was just as I had selected center is display/desktop. That was the first place that I checked and I had selected stretch to cover the full laptop screen.

In viewing my screen windows is displayed in the center with about a 2 inch black frame around the windows area. Very small to view.

The steps I took: I went into bios and put the cd as lead to boot up first. I restarted to computer and setup came up. I went thru the steps to format the drive. Then I installed windows on the computer...

The funny thing is I can go into the bios and do nothing and reboot and the screen is as it should be. However, when I shut down the laptop and reboot I get the small screen again. I dont know what else to do...any help would be appreciated. chuck

 

Did you install the video driver?

 

I had not installed a video driver. At display properties/settings I had 32 bit selected. I did install the video driver off of the dell resource cd, however, no change was made..chuck

 

This doesn't sound like a driver problem. The fact that you can boot into BIOS and then exit and get a normal screen, but not with a normal boot tells me there's a BIOS or hardware problem somewhere. Try booting from a live Linux CD (like Ubuntu 9.10) and see how your screen looks. If you get the same problem, then it's definitely a hardware or BIOS problem. Do you have the latest BIOS installed? Check support.dell.com

 

Another poster had recommended that I press the Fn + F7 key. Whatever that combo does fixed the problem..chuck

 

Hmmmm, that's pretty strange. Since you didn't say which model Inspiron you have, how would anyone know what to recommend? On my Inspiron, Fn+F7 doesn't do anything except mute the audio.

In Windows, pressing F5 will refresh the display.

 

You are right I didn't mention what model I have that was my bad. And I don't remember anyone asking me that question either. The problem was not the display of windows. As I mentioned before when Windows was displayed on the lcd screen there was a 2" black rectangle surrounding the windows screen. As I have found out since I posted that the fn key in combination with a F key does different things and in my case it was the F7 key that affects the LCD screen. My model is an 8200. I shouldn't say my model I am just doing some work on this laptop for my daughter and had no idea that the LCD screen would not be any different than any monitor that I might connect. The lesson has been well learned.