So there's been a popular thread over at the EeeUser forum for a few weeks now about an experimental driver for Windows XP that lets you run some virtual resolutions on an Eee PC. Sure, the screen is technically only capable of displaying 800 x 480 pixels, but through some clever techniques (so clever I'm not sure I could explain them if I tried), you can sort of cram 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, or even 1280 x 1024 pixels onto that tiny little screen.

But here's the problem. You achieve this effect by skimming pixels that were used for doing things like making your fonts and icons. So while you may be able to achieve the desired goal of getting your 800 x 600 video game or 1024 x 768 web page to fit onto your screen, it won't necessarily look pretty. Or readable, for that matter.

I was in the midst of playing with the font settings to make the display as comfortable as possible when I realized two things:

1. I was getting a headache from trying to read from a squashed screen.
2. There's a bug with this driver that keeps your display from working properly when you resume from sleep. In other words, you can put your PC to sleep but when it wakes up you get to stare at a black screen.

So despite the fact that my only complaint with the Eee PC is that it's hard to view some web pages and other content on its 800 x 480 pixel screen, I went ahead and uninstalled the driver.

If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps and test this out, let me tell you one thing that saved me a lot of time and effort. Before trying to install the driver, you have to not only uninstall your current display drivers, but you need to uninstall the Asus display utility from the Control Panel. In order to do this, you should uninstall the ACPI utility. You can go ahead and reinstall it after you've loaded the new display drivers.

[via Eee User]