We’ve probably all come across annoying programs that insist in taking over your monitor to run in ‘full screen’ mode, but are designed only for a particular monitor resolution, leaving nice big black borders when running a higher resolution.
I’ve been using just such a program a lot lately that is designed to only run at 800×600 resolution. Even on my laptop this ends up with huge amounts of wasted space, plus all the text and images are a bit too small to see comfortably. I’ve been manually switching my display to 800×600, but that gets old fast. I figured there must be a better way to do this.
It turns out that there is, and it’s a tiny program called Resolution Changer. This little gem weighs in at only 84k (when’s the last time you installed anything smaller than a megabyte?) and can switch to arbitrary resolutions, run a program, and then when the program finishes switch back to the original resolution.
I downloaded this program, and copied it into “C:\Program Files\reschange\”. Then I went to the shortcut which starts the annoying program and edited the properties so that this:
“C:\Program Files\reschange\reschange.exe” -width=800 -height=600
was added to the start of the “Target:” in front of the program executable that was previously there.
Voila! Now when I click to start that program, my display changes to 800×600. When I exit the program it switches right back to the original resolution.