Absolutely Wrong

So the designers over at Absolute Poker decided to make windows that are about 800x600. This makes sense on the surface because people like to 4-table and have 1600x1200 resolution.

But that's not counting the task bar.

Now, it's possible in windows to make that disappear, but I'm convinced that only the elderly and the retarded choose to do that. Especially for poker. It's great to have the task bar pop up every time you try to hit an action button in your game, causing you to inadvertently do nothing but bring some random task into focus.

I'd been managing this by running with slight vertical overlap on my monitor for some time, which is mostly annoying since half of those all-important action buttons are covered by the window below.

Luckily i had a monitor laying around that supports 1792x1344 resolution. It's a very odd brand of 4:3 dots, but for this specific situation it's great.

So I go ahead and plug it into my laptop (I succeeded in setting things up so that I no longer need a desktop computer, and can live from this beautiful Inspiron 9300), and get ready for beauty.

Well, the resolutions that the ATI drivers (I have a Radeon X300 Mobility card) support (on the high end) are 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 1920x1440 and 2048x1536. They notably skip what I want and need, and there was no way to enable more resolutions. ATI says that their card will also do 1920x1080 but that remains to be seen. Perhaps I just need a different monitor to see that beauty in action.

Anyhow, I resorted to going back to http://www.omegadrivers.net/ and getting the latest ATI replacement drivers. They're much better than those that come directly from ATI, and amazingly they can run the right resolution on my other monitor. It was worth the 10 hours I had to wait before my network connection stopped acting up and I could download the 22 meg installer.

The sad thing is that the original drivers (I wiped this system as soon as I got it) that came with this laptop were even more inept than those put out by ATI, so people who use either those, or the ones straight from ATI are SOL when it comes to getting proper use out of their equipment. I guess that's how computers have always been.