I (finally) got this wonderful second monitor to my work machine. It’s a near-HD widescreen Dell thingy and it makes working with multiple windows so much nicer.

But of course, things ain’t better and they could be perfect. The thing is that Windows XP don’t scale. In this case, it don’t (or doesn’t) scale the stuff on the screen.

The new monitor is a 20 inch thing with 1680×1050 resolution. My laptop’s display is 1900×1200 at 15 inches. But the way Windows XP sees it, i’ve got a smaller screen and a bigger screen. The smaller screen just happens to be physically bigger than the bigger one… That means that when i move my mouse pointer, the pointer suddenly rushes like crazy when it goes from the laptop screen to the new “main viewer”.  Or it makes a vertical jump whenever it goes from one screen to the other — if it doesn’t get stuck at the bottom of the higher-resolution laptop screen.

Why oh why can’t i set the physical size as an attribute to the screen? Or put more technically, why can’t i set the DPI resolution of both of my screens independently? Or even better, why doesn’t Windows do this automagically for me? I bet if it were a Mac, it already woulda

(Update: Seems like this is possible on Windows Vista)

(Update on the update: Nope. Seems like it won’t.)