Here's an odd one and I have no idea if there's a work around. Surely I can't be the only person around that uses an HDTV as a second monitor. Well, I just upgraded the main monitor to a 27" 4K monitor with the 55" TV above it. My display settings look like this:



When the actual physical layout is closer to this:



Does anyone know of a way to get Windows to recognize the physical dimensions and not just resolution? This would be useful primarily when moving the mouse from one screen to the other. I've looked at scaling and in the advanced settings it states that it may be hard to get things back to normal if needed. Maybe create a restore point and then poke around in there...

Ah, yes, the wonderous world of high DPI scaling. I thought I read somewhere that it's more or less working in Windows. Guess I was wrong. To work around this in Linux I just halfed the resolution of the 4k monitor. It should bring your setup to



Still not ideal, but a little closer.

I remember that back in the days I could set the physical size of my monitor (well, it was a projector and a canvas) and pixel resolution seperately and it would calculate the correct DPI for me. But this was on Linux and I don't think it worked for two monitors.

TL;DR: Your TV's native DPI is lower than Windows supports so it's treating it like a 96 DPI panel. Your 4k monitor is also set to 96 DPI / 100% scaling (most likely because you've configured it that way, but it could also be an EDID issue). Despite the annoyance while moving between screens, this is almost certainly the behavior you actually want.

Because you're mixing a 40 DPI display with a 160 DPI display and want to treat them like their physical layout, the only other options I know of are to run your 4k display at 400% scaling so its effective DPI matches the TV's, or use an 8k custom resolution for the TV that downscales to 1080p. Neither of these options are good. Actually, both are terrible. Much worse than what you're already dealing with.

Yeah, I don't feel like doing the (simple) math right now to see what the actual DPI of the TV is, I'm sure I have the specs handy for the monitor. Regardless that would be the way to do it, if you can specify the actual DPI, if windows doesn't know, for each monitor so that Windows can more accurately represent the physical layout of the monitors, assuming they're set to their native resolutions.

You are correct, of course, Jon that none of those options are better than the current situation. I basically just have it configured so that dragging up from roughly the middle half of the bottom 4K screen takes me to roughly center on the TV. It's not a big deal but I don't think this should be a hard thing to fix.

Thanks for the suggestions!

The DPI numbers I posted should be exactly or very close to what you have. Your TV is around 40 DPI. Windows can’t scale below 96 DPI. That means there’s nothing you can do to specify the actual DPI, as you said. Windows can’t handle the actual DPI and isn’t capable of making your TV behave the way you want.

I get that it's not capable. I just don't think it would be that hard to add that sort of capability. Of course I do understand a few things here. First, I'm not a programmer. Second, even though I'm certainly not the only one doing this, there probably aren't that many people doing so. Third, Microsoft doesn't care.

try

Actually, not that it really matters, I should correct something. Sliding up from about the center of the bottom monitor gets me roughly directly above in the top monitor.

So I hadn't actually bothered yet to install the correct drivers and software for the new monitor so I just did that. Of course that has nothing to do with the topic above but something I needed to do still. I think this might be the only thing I bought on any Prime day that at least looked like a good deal. It was $200 off list and $100 below what they currently have it at. I wish I could have really justified a full fledged color calibrated monitor but this one is pretty close and does at least come with a sheet showing how it performed when tested. It's this model: link

Saw the comment there, "Treat every gun as a loaded weapon", and immediately thought back to Spike's reckless play with a loaded pistol in the Bebop episode I'd watched the other night. When I saw that episode I had to wince pretty hard as I witnessed him (in episode 5) loading it in order to aim directly at Jet as a nervous tick.

To be faaaaaaair, it's a cartoon with a suicidal nihilist who is ambivalent towards the ultimate safety of others for a protagonist.

Remembers how the rest of that episode played out

Oh, you're right.

If anyone here has used an older Windows key from a previous PC to upgrade another computer I would be interested to hear how your experience was. I purchased a Windows 7 OEM disc that I used to upgrade an old PC from XP and later to 10 but that PC is no longer in service. I've read that old keys are often allowed during the activation process so I was thinking about trying on an old Vista laptop. The other option is to do a reinstall on that computer to clean the crap off of it and speed it up a bit. It just resides in the garage and is mostly used for internet access or would be more if I can speed it up a bit. I'm tempted to keep it as is though because being a 32 bit older OS gives me greater compatibility with older games but since I hardly game anymore whats the point?

Okay, so I restored to factory and removed most of the bloat. It's nearing the end of the update process. I've downloaded some lightweight browsers to try. I'm thinking about setting a restore point and then trying the Windows 10 upgrade with the old OEM W7 key to see what happens. The computer is much faster now that Vista is cleaned up though.

You know, I've had two "terrible" OSs that nobody likes but that I never really had any problems with. Windows ME and Vista. I literally through the old ME box in the bin (not because of Windows) but the Vista laptop is still chugging along. Granted, other than being a downrange entertainment center it never really had to do much. It converted most of my DVDs to MP4s back then and I did some gaming on it. When I came home it usually sat. The fan seems to squeal a bit from time to time though.

If this just seems unworkable I may build a little Raspberry Pi box to replace it.

Well, it looks like it gave up the ghost. It was working great though. No biggie. I think I'll start looking at pis now. I was really impressed with one of the browsers I tried though. I think it was called Vivaldi.

Oddly, all of my recent posts are from this old laptop. It has recovered from it's recent crash, discovered when I decided to turn it on again yesterday. I actually ended up leaving it on all night last night and it's still fine. Needless to say, I won't be putting anything critical on it but it is serving it's purpose well, for now.

Well, seeing as this is "any technical support" - and since I recally this forum having or having had actual engineers:

If I link my PC to an amplifier, through a 3.5mm-to-RCA-cable, and the sound has the widely feared static and high-pitched buzzing only when my mouse is moving and when my CPU is doing heavy lifting -

Does that tell me something about the specific cause of the problem, and the specific solution?

Thanks

I have some unwanted noise in my setup as well. I've found the first page of this thread interesting: https://forums.tomsguide.com/threads/high-pitched-static-sound-from-speakers.323630/

Thanks for that. But I have seen loads of these sites, all with different ideas and solutions, and no easy to follow algorithm from start to finish that will guarantee to diagnose and solve the program in an affordable manner.

For example, optical seems to be electrical interference-proof. Alas, I have no optical out on my motherboard/soundcard. Would a 3.5mm-to-optical converter be efficient?

And what about an external USB DAC... Does it actually bypass the internal DAC on the motherboard?

I hate how confusing it is, and seems to be to everyone.

There are lots of reasons this can happen and none of them are easy to diagnose.

An external USB DAC on a powered hub plugged in to the same properly grounded outlet as your amplifer will probably hide your noise issue, whatever the root cause happens to be.

I have one.

I have a Getac v110 that I have Ubuntu 16.04 running on. It freezes seemingly randomly but I suspect it has something to do my browser (Brave ((Chrome))) or maybe suspending the laptop sometimes and some sort of issues with this version of ubuntu, but I have no idea what to google.