Your Monitor

Monitors are manufactured in much the same way as televisions (except they don't have a tuner to pick up TV signals) and are generally graded by their physical screen size and their perfomance capabilities.

The physical screen size of a monitor is measured diagonally from corner to corner on the face of the cathode ray tube (CRT). However, in order to secure the tube in the plastic case of the monitor, the very edges of the tube end up hidden from view. This means that if you measure diagonally from corner to corner across the visible face of any 15" monitor, it will probably measure around 14".

Your monitor will have two cables which need to be connected between the PC and the monitor. One is the power or mains lead which should be connected to the power supply on the PC:-

The other lead is the signal lead. This lead carries all the information for the display to the monitor and needs to be connected to the PC:-

Display Quality
The resolution of a monitor screen is usually described as the number of pixels wide x the number of pixels high. It's a bit like saying the number of 'dots' which go to make up the picture. If the same picture, say of a car, is made up of 1,000 dots or 10,000 dots, which will be the better picture? The one made from 10,000 will be the more detailed one - the resolution of the car will be much better.

SVGA or EVGA?
So your monitor is capable of displaying information in a number of different screen resolutions depending on its type, i.e. SVGA or EVGA. If your monitor is of the SVGA (Super Video Graphics Array) type, then it will support any resolution upto 800 x 600, which gives a text height you can comfortably read on any size of monitor.

If the monitor is EVGA (Enhanced Video Graphics Array) then it will support any resolution upto 1024 x 768, which gives a great picture and comfortable text height on 17" and larger monitors. However, the picture and text may look a little small and not easy to read on 14" and 15" monitors.

The manual you received with your monitor should tell you what type of monitor you have and also what the maximum resolution is for your monitor. You can use your monitor to display information in any resoulution up to the maximum for your monitor type.

Vertical Refresh Rate (or how fast your monitor is!)
Your picture quality can also be affected by the 'Vertical Refresh Rate' . This is the speed at which the whole picture is refreshed or renewed. The higher the refresh rate, the less likely you are to see any flashing or jittering of the screen as it refreshes, because your eye can't keep up with it. Typical vertical refresh rates for current 14" and 15" monitors are 75Hz at resolutions of 640 x 480 and 800 x 600.

Larger size monitor such as 17" and 21" will generally support 75Hz at the higher resolutions of 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024. At a vertical refresh rate of 60Hz you may see some visible jittering of the screen image.

Energy Saving
A lower case 'e' on the end of either SVGA or EVGA, means that the monitor is capable of power management, or meets the requirements of the US 'Energy Star' program. Basically, if the monitor is connected to a PC which has power management abilities (like current Apricot PCs), the monitor and PC will go to sleep if you don't use it for some time. By doing this they save energy and a few pennies on your electricity bill each time they go for a snooze.

They are both easily woken up by any keyboard or mouse activity and it usually takes around 5 seconds for the picture to reappear completely.

Picture Adjustment
Your monitor will have controls towards the front of the case which allow you to do a certain amount of picture adjustment, again in much the same way as your TV's controls.

In addition to these TV type controls, such as contrast and brightness, you will also have dimensional controls. These let you 'move' the picture around the screen and enlarge it or shrink it to a certain extent. So, you should be able to set up the picture in the middle of the screen and expand it right to the edges if you want to.

If you change resolutions, or even swap monitors between computers, you'll probably have to fiddle with picture size and position to get it just right again.

Troubleshooting

Thin Grey Lines on your Picture?
Some monitor manufacturers use a manufacturing technique which produces one or two very thin grey lines, left to right on the screen image. Whilst other manufacturing techniques don't directly interfere with the image your monitor is displaying, this technique has the added benefit of producing excellent picture quality.

So, these lines are as a result of the way the monitor is built and not because of a fault with the monitor. On a 15" monitor built using this technique, one thin grey line may be found about a third of the way up from the bottom of the picture. The line may be quite visible on a pure white background and a larger monitor, such as a 21" model, may have two lines equally spaced.

Many televisions are also built using this technique by the same manufacturers, but a pure white picture is rarely transmitted long enough for you to detect the lines - but they are there!

A Blank Screen?
You may have accidentally selected a resolution which your monitor does not support - if you do this in Windows you will be warned before the mode is selected permanently. However, if the selection is made permanent and the monitor does not support the selected mode, your monitor will blank the screen and the status of the power light on the front of the monitor will change (it may flash or change colour) to show you that the monitor is still working, but unable to support the mode you have selected.

Wonky Colours!
If you get another magnetic field (such as that emitted from a speaker) in close contact with your monitor, you may end up with colour distortion of your screen image. Don't worry, you just need to degauss! So first get rid of the cause of the distortion, which could be another monitor, a fan or a set of speakers too close to your monitor. Next, return your picture to normal either by pressing the degauss buttton if your monitor has one (your manual will tell you) or by switching off your monitor and waiting for it to cool a little before switching it back on again. This should restore your picture to normal.

Tilting Picture
The adjustment controls on some larger monitors now include a control which allows you to tilt or rotate your picture to get it square with the edges of the case. However, this control is quite expensive to include in the design and manufacture of monitors, so it is usually only the larger more expensive models that have this type of adjustment.

Can't Stretch Your Picture Right To The Edges?
The combination of a new monitor and a new PC should mean that you can move and stretch your picture to the very edges of the display area - right up to the plastic surround. If you have a slightly older monitor, say last year's model combined with a PC which doesn't have the very latest video chipset, you may have problems getting the picture to fill the whole of the display area.