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Frank HelkFlag for Germany

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Tweak monitor detection / screen resolution

Hello friends,

I'm confronted with some crappy KVM box problem. The KVM box connects a couple of PC machines with various flavours of Windows to 4 monitors, and allows to display the signal of any PC on any desired monitor (even multiple). The PC machines are set up to 1600x1200, which is the desired resolution of the monitors.

Unfortunately on booting up the machine, the KVM box reports a lower resolution to the PC, resulting in a 1600 x 1200 desktop "windowed" onto a lower resoluton monitor (only a cutout of the desktop is displayed, and if the mouse pointer touches the border, the cutout is moved accordingly).

My question: Is there any way to circumvent the auto-detection of the screen resolution and (brute) force Windows to use a specified screen resolution setting regardless of what the monitor seems to tell ?

Related: Is there any way to force the display size in RDP sessions  for server side, regardless of what the client requests ?

Thanks in advance
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OK - got it.

For the convenience of future users, here's the full story:

Based on the link and some more links wrought out of Google, I finally found the "Monitor Asset Manager" from "EnTech Taiwan" (see http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm). That tool is capable of reading the monitor info as sent from the device and generate an .INF file from that. With that tool on another PC I've fetched the correct info for the monitors and saved that into an .INF file.

That .INF file I've loaded into an editor and tweaked the device ID (which was from the real present EIZO display) and related info to suit the PnP ID etc. the KVM box sends out. That way I created a "monitor driver" that allows the correct display parameters to be used.

Afterwards I've opened the device manager and did a "driver update" with that driver ... Windows nagged that this driver was not digitally signed, but that posed no problem.

Thanks !

P.S.: rindi's solution was tried before and did not help in that case.
For the convenience of future users, here's some update  with the final solution.

While testing the solution I found that many stations didn't respect the the given specs by the tweaked INF file - it still got overridden by the crappy KVM's info.

The final solution is really brute, and definitely not a recommended procedure (use entirely at your own risk, your mileage may vary), but it seems to work for my case ...

  1. I used EnTech's Monitor Asset Manager (see http://entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm ) to extract the timing info from the monitor type used behind the KVM box. For that info I generated an INF file.
  2. I grabbed both a male and a femal 15 pin "wall mount" VGA connector and soldered them back-to-back, leaving the pins 4, 11, 12 and 15 unconnected. These are the pins that are used to tell the computer about the monitor capabilities, so I leave the PC "completely blind" about the connected monitor. The resulting "blindfold" adapter I covered with some insulating tape around the connector back sides to prevent accidental shortcuts.
  3. I plugged the adapter in between the station's VGA output and the KVM box cable.
  4. I opened the Windows device manager, uninstalled all monitor drivers and let it search for changed hardware. For the newly found "(Standard monitor)" devices, I installed the new INF file mentioned above as new driver.

Et vóila ... perfect screen settings after reboot.