CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [335]
Figure 19-65 Third-party video tab
Color Correction Sometimes the colors on your monitor are not close enough for your tastes to the actual color you’re trying to create. In this case you use color correction to fine-tune the colors on the screen to get the look you want.
Rotation All monitors are by default wider than they are tall. This is called landscape mode. Some LCD monitors can be physically rotated to facilitate users who like to see their desktops taller than they are wide (portrait mode). Figure 19-66 shows the author’s LCD monitors rotated in portrait mode. If you want to rotate your screen, you must tell the system you’re rotating it.
Figure 19-66 Portrait mode
Modes Most video cards add very advanced settings to enable you to finely tweak your monitor. These very dangerous settings have names such as “sync polarity” or “front porch” and are outside the scope of both CompTIA A+ certification and the needs of all but the most geeky techs. These settings are mostly used to display a nonstandard resolution. Stay out of those settings!
Working with Drivers
Now that you know the locations of the primary video tools within the operating system, it’s time to learn about fine-tuning your video. You need to know how to work with video drivers from within the Display/Personalization applet, including how to update them, roll back updates, and uninstall them.
Windows is very persnickety when it comes to video card drivers. You can crash Windows and force a reinstallation simply by installing a new video card and not uninstalling the old card’s drivers. This doesn’t happen every time, but certainly can happen. As a basic rule, always uninstall the old card’s drivers before you install drivers for a new card.
When you update the drivers for a card, you have a choice of uninstalling the outdated drivers and then installing new drivers—which makes the process the same as for installing a new card—or you can let Windows flex some digital muscle and install the new ones right over the older drivers.
To update your drivers, go to the Control Panel and double-click the Display applet or Personalization applet. In the Display Properties/Display Settings dialog box, select the Settings tab/Monitor tab and click the Advanced or Advanced Settings button. In the Advanced button dialog box, click the Adapter tab and then click the Properties button. In the Properties dialog box for your adapter (Figure 19-67), select the Driver tab and then click the Update Driver button to run the Hardware Update wizard.
Figure 19-67 Adapter Properties dialog box
Practical Application
3-D Graphics
No other area of the PC world reflects the amazing acceleration of technological improvements more than 3-D graphics—in particular, 3-D gaming—that attempts to create images with the same depth and texture as objects seen in the real world. We are spectators to an amazing new world where software and hardware race to produce new levels of realism and complexity displayed on the computer screen. Powered by the wallets of tens of millions of PC gamers always demanding more and better, the video industry constantly introduces new video cards and new software titles that make today’s games so incredibly realistic and fun. Although the gaming world certainly leads the PC industry in 3-D technologies, many other PC applications—such as Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs—quickly snatch up these technologies, making 3-D more useful in many ways other than just games. In this section, we’ll add to the many bits and pieces of 3-D video encountered over previous chapters in the book and put together an understanding of the function and configuration of 3-D graphics.
Before the early 1990s, PCs did not mix well with 3-D graphics. Certainly, many 3-D applications existed, primarily 3-D design programs such as AutoCAD and Intergraph, but these applications would often run only on expensive, specialized