screen reolution

[Joe]

Hi! I have a HP Pavillion 503w with 128 mb of ram, 40 gig hard drive, an intel celeron 1.7, and windows xp. I reinstalled windows on my computer now it won't let me change the screen resolution or the color. It is stuck in medium 16bit color and a 640 by 480 screen resolution. Also, when I go to device manager it has a section that says "other devices". In there it says video controller (VGA Compatible) and that has a little yellow thing on it. And I don't know what kind of video card installed. Can anyone help me???

[David Ramsey]

First, you should be aware that this is a forum for HP _calculators_. Your Pavilion is not a calculator.

Second, the reason you can't set higher resolutions is that you need to install an additional driver for your video card. Without this driver, Windows is limited to the 16 color, 640 by 480 pixel screen you have.

You can get the drivers from the web site of your video card's manufacturer. If you don't know what kind of video card you have, there are several options:

1. Look in the documentation and on the CDs that came with your computer.

2. Open the computer up, remove the video card, and look.

3. The video card's guts are probably made by either nVidia or ATI. Download drivers from both companies and try to install them-- they won't install unless you have the right card, so it's pretty safe.