Changing Your Monitor's Refresh Rate
I have an older Sony Trinitron monitor, made approximately in 1992. It's a 20" monitor that supports
a resolution of 1024x768. However, whenever I set it to that resolution via Control Panel, the screen
image was distored and horribly bowed. I found, on a NT machine, the only way it worked properly was
when the refresh rate was set to 70MHz (a resolution of 800x600 required 72MHz, and I wasn't even
interested in 640x480). The problem was the machine I wanted to use it on was running Win98, and the
only available refresh rates were 65MHz, 75MHz, and 85MHz. A while later I stumbled upon an Win32
function called ChangeDisplaySettings(). The below code snippet shows how to use it to
change the refresh rate:
DEVMODE devMode;
::ZeroMemory(&devMode, sizeof(devMode));
devMode.dmDisplayFrequency = 70;
devMode.dmFields = DM_DISPLAYFREQUENCY;
devMode.dmSize = sizeof(devMode);
ChangeDisplaySettings(&devMode, 0);
I created a console application that gets launched at startup which executes the above code.
Initially, when Windows starts up, the screen image is distored, but once the program launches I
have perfect 1024x768 resolution. So before you get rid of that monitor you just can't seem to
adjust, give the above code a try.
