As you surf the net, you'll often come across indications that the site you're looking at is best viewed at "800X600 pixels" or "800X600 Resolution". Here's what that means:

Imagine, say, a picture of a straight line.  On a computer monitor, the line that you see is made up of 'pixels'--tiny dots, same as when you watch the telly.  The 'resolution' is the amount of pixels that take up a certain area on your monitor's screen.  The higher the resolution, the more pixels will fit on your monitor's screen, and vice versa. The more that fit on the screen, the smaller but 'tighter' and more crisp a picture or graphic will look. Aside from that consideration, when a web designer creates a page, she will often use tables or frames or all kinds of HTML magic that isn't in itself important to this explanation..  The bottom line:  a designer tries to design with a certain resolution in mind so that webpages won't need to be scrolled horizontally in order to read them, so that the layout and use of space looks as good as she can make it (she will try to keep various viewer resolutions in mind, but with the greater variety on monitor sizes and with WEB-TV, it comes down to the adage 'you can't please everyone'. You will find , though, as you surf the net, that MOST websites look best at 800X600 and that that resolution is pretty much the standard.

So, how do you set your monitor to display at 800X600? It's easy... But I have to warn you that if you are going from a 480X640 to an 600X800 resolution, the new look WILL take some getting used to; but after a few days, the older resolution will look awful to you. Things will appear smaller--but better artistically speaking and you will have to do much less scrolling. If you use Windows95, here's what you do:

1) click on your START BUTTON
2) when the start menu pops up, scroll up to where you see "SETTINGS"
3) slide your cursor over til where you see "CONTROL PANEL" and click on it
4) a new window will open. Search it for the icon labelled "DISPLAY"
5) click the tab at the top of the Display window where it says "SETTINGS"
6) you will see a slide bar there.  Slide the bar over until "800X600" is indicated
7) click the button labelled "APPLY"
8) you will be asked if you want to keep the new settings.  Click yes.


   You MAY have to restart your computer.  That's OK...  As long as any older eyes out there are comfortable surfing sites at an 800X600 resolution, and after you get used to the new look, it will have been well worth it. If you disagree with me, you can go back to 480X640 by going through the same process above but change step 6 to revert to your original settings.

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