Problems with LCD?

[ride2bhi]

Hello,
I have a very obscure problem with my Planar LCD (CT1744NU). Whenever I play an Age of Empires related video game (yes I have too much time on my hands) the intro screen becomes extremely zoomed in, so much that 3/4 of the image is not visible on screen. After the initial splash intro, the game menu comes up full screen. This is where it gets interesting. The menu image is sized correctly and fills the screen, but my ability to move the mouse on this screen becomes limited to a smaller, rectangular area within the monitor. This "inner" rectangle allows me to select all menu options including those that are outside of the inner rectangle, except I have to click where I think the button would be if the menu image fit within this smaller area?!? The Planar is hooked up to a Matrox G550 DVI on an XP system. If I decrease the screen size in display properties, the monitor simply shrinks the viewable area to the screen size requested, leaving a large black border filling in the difference in size between the 1280 and 1024 default size, and the new size setting. This also has no effect on the game problems since the monitor seems to reset before the intro movies are shown. I have checked the drivers, but the monitor is plug and play. I have also tried adjusting the actual monitor settings, also without luck. Pretty obscure but any help would be appreciated.

[jase71]

It actually doesn't sound like a problem with the monitor... more a problem with the game. All monitors do is display the picture sent to them by the video card, so there's no way, under normal circumstances, that the monitor should do anything like limit your mouse travel to a narrow area.

Doublecheck to make sure you have the latest video drivers for your card.

Check to see if there's a patch for the game available.

And possibly uninstall and reinstall the game.

If you're convinced it's the monitor, I'd see if you can beg, borrow, or steal another monitor to hook up in it's place for half an hour or so... but I suspect a different monitor would give you the same results...

[Leon]

I had a few interesting problems with my Compaq 18.1" LCD. The native resolution is 1280x1024, but when I played Counter-Strike in 1280x1024 mode, the screen was cut off. I switched to 1024x768 and it was fine. Weird stuff. Can you play around with the in-game resolution at all? I'm not sure because I have never played that game.