Undoing a tricky screen-resolution mistake.

[Hippo Man]

I'm using Windows 2000 (don't ask!) and I accidentally messed myself up by setting the screen resolution to be higher than the monitor can handle.

I set it to 1280x3072 instead of 1280x1024, and now, the status bar and 2/3 of my screen is invisible because it's below the bottom of what my monitor will show.

I thought it would be easy to fix this: just go into Control Panel->Display->Settings and change the screen area back to 1280x1024. Unfortunately, this isn't working for me, because when I start to do that, a modal dialog box comes up somewhere below the bottom of my monitor, and I can't reach it to click on the OK button in order to continue with the resizing process.

I have a network login with Local Administrator rights, but I have no local login. Therefore, I can't go into Safe Mode (although I'm not sure that would help, anyway).

Can any of you think of a way I can fix this? Is there perhaps a command-line way of making this screen-size change that I can invoke from the Console? Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[AlanHo]

If you have an Acronis or other back-up with an associated boot CD - you can get back by that route.

If not - are you able to boot into Windows using your Windows CD..?

[Hippo Man]

I figured it out and fixed it!

I suddenly remembered that I have an old, no-longer-supported freeware virtual screen manager program called JS Pager. Among other things, that program lets me move windows using a pager control, even windows that are modal dialog boxes.

I put it on a shared network drive and then ran it on my machine with the hosed screen resolution. Luckily, its window pager control showed up in the upper left of my screen.

I then once again tried to set the screen area via the Display applet. When the modal dialog box came up, I saw it in the window pager control and moved it upwards so that it showed up on the visible portion of my screen. I then clicked OK and voila! My resolution is now happily back to 1280x1024 where it belongs.

Anyway, maybe this methodology can help someone else with a similar problem in the future.

Thanks for providing a forum for us to discuss things like this.

[Hippo Man]

If you have an Acronis or other back-up with an associated boot CD - you can get back by that route.

If not - are you able to boot into Windows using your Windows CD..?

Thanks for this.

As you can see, I now have managed to fix this.

It turns out that I don't have the Windows CD nor any kind of boot media, because this is a corporate network install of Win2K. I suppose I could have called the network admins here in order for them to do this, but I'm glad I found a way to fix this without getting them involved (I want to avoid the convoluted corporate politics here whenever possible).

Anyway, thanks again!