The other day I spent a few hours playing with a tool that lets you virtually display 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 resolutions on the Eee PC's 800 x 480 display. I wasn't particularly impressed with the results. First of all, the way graphics driver accomplishes this seemingly impossible feat is by removing pixels that you kind of need in order to make the screen readable. And second, the driver caused a problem that kept my Eee PC from resuming from sleep properly. So I went and uninstalled the driver.

But being a glutton for punishment, when I saw a new tool that does pretty much the same thing today, I had to try it. And I have to say, I'm mildly impressed. I mean, it's still practically impossible to read any text when your desktop is set to 1024 x 768, but EeeUser forum member kkjj's new tool is incredibly easy to use and most importantly, it doesn't cause any problems resuming from sleep. Better yet, he's working on adding support for 1000 x 600 and 1024 x 600 resolutions, which would be awesome (if they're readable).

Because the EeeUser forum thread is starting to get a little long, here are the quick steps I took to get this driver working:

1. Download and install the Asus R2H Intel graphics driver found here.
2. Reboot your computer.
3. Close the Astray.exe utility either by right-clicking on the tray icon or from the task manager.
   
4. Download and unzip kkjj's Eee PC res tool.
5. Run the utility and choose your resolution.

I don't think I'm going to wind up switching resolutions very often unless I find a way to make fonts more readable. But this time I think I'll keep the new drivers installed. While the 1024 x 768 mode is unreadable, the 800 x 600 mode is pretty usable. And while the screen looks a bit squashed (since you're taking a standard resolution and displaying it on a widescreen monitor), I would much rather be able to use 800 x 600 scaled down to my screen than have to scroll up and down to see the tops and bottoms of windows, which is how the default Asus utility.