Carl J

IE6 + High-DPI == Bad Graphics

So I just received my new Dell XPS M1710 a few days ago, to replace my older Dell Inspiron 9400 (and just in time too, because a BIOS update the day before made Visual Studio on the older system unusable, even after reinstalling it), and must say that so far, this is by far the best laptop that I’ve ever had.

It even has red glowing lights on the front, sides and top, which, like the the stickers and ground effects on Civic, and make the system go faster

But all was not picture perfect with it.

When I opened up IE6 for the first time (I didn’t, and won’t upgrade to IE7), I noticed something different about the pages that I normal browsed to.

No matter what page I went to in IE6 (ya ya, I know, I should of upgraded to IE7), all of the images were horrible. But for some reason the images looked perfect in Opera and Firefox.

Well, after doing a bit of research, I discovered the problem was that “Windows XP and Windows 2000 do not natively support high-DPI screens“. Apparently Internet Explorer 6 and above try to solve the issue of monitors that use a high-DPI (anything over the normal 96), by proportionally adjusting the scale on displays with higher resolution, which in my case, was the problem.

The solution to my problem, was a quick registry edit and a reboot.

In their solution they say to add the ‘UserHR’ key under ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main’ with a DWORD value of ’00000001′. However, I already had ‘UserHR’ with that exact value, so I deleted it, rebooted, and VOILA, whadyaknow, it works.

What I found strange is that the Inspiron laptop never had that issue, even though it too had its DPI set to 120. So I checked its registry, and that key that I deleted above, wasn’t to be found.

Here are the two Microsoft links that talk about IE6 and high DPI screens:

• Adjusting Scale for Higher DPI Screens
• Windows XP and Windows 2000 do not natively support high-DPI screens