One of the annoyances for me about many netbooks is the choice of the 1024×600 pixel screen. When you are around the office you can make use external monitors as I have already discussed, but when you are actually mobile there is simply not enough pixels. There are a couple of things you can do beyond using the F11 fullscreen view in Firefox.

1. Task bar to hide

You do not need the task bar all the time, and just making it hide gives you the equivalent of 768 pixels in the vertical. You can make this much easier to manage by making use of software such as ObjectDock as well – a pure steal from the Mac of course.

2. Play with the DPI

You can make the font size of all applications (well almost all) reduce in size, by playing with the DPI (Dots Per Inch) settings in the Settings area of the screen properties. By default, this is 96DPI (at least on all my machines) and the settings give you some movement in this value by using the custom option. Now, if you have a real big screen on a computer, some people also actually increase the DPI with the 120DPI setting already being built in. You can see the display steps to the setting here:

Now doing this does require a reboot, and you have to read the dialogue boxes very carefully to select the right answer.

Now with the DPI setting, the actual amount you choose depends on what you feel comfortable with, but I find that 80% is the lowest you can reasonably go, with 90% being even more comfortable.

So what is the downside? Well some applications do not scale and some dialogue boxes can be a bit screwy – but not to the extent that I have had problems when set to 80% DPI. The only additional problem you can have is that some windows do not display anything, which is very rare – hey Microsoft can you fix Live Messenger please!

You can always change it back to 100% if it is that important, but the gain is good as shown in this screenshot – click to see it full size.

This optimisation works on any of the netbooks, including those not-made by Sony