Display Issue Tosh Satellite Pro

[witch]

I hope someone has seen this because I never have - this is a teacher's laptop - very new - connected to a Smart board. The screen on the laptop is fine, but when F5 is pressed and the option to display on the whiteboard AND the laptop is chosen, the icons on the laptop go all 'widescreen' and some things don't display well (they fall off the screen etc). The display settings do not change - 1024 by 768.
Can anyone tell me why and if I can stop it?
Ta

[tmcd35]

Is it a widescreen laptop? Are you sure the default res is 1024x768 on the laptop? My first guess would be the default res on the laptop is probably 1440x900 (a widescreen res) and when you switch to the projector the laptop switched to 1024x768 because that is what the projector supports. 1024x768 would look stretched on a widescreen display.

My other thought was a widescreen projector doing something to the display?

[TheLibrarian]

I've seen some of our Dell laptops do odd things when using the keyboard shortcuts to cloning the screen after image deployment (default driver configuration).

Once we've use the display control panel to set the resolutions / aspect ratio / refresh rates the keyboard shortcuts seem to work fine.

HTH.

[CESIL]

I would have to agree with tmcd35...

Is it a widescreen laptop? Are you sure the default res is 1024x768 on the laptop? My first guess would be the default res on the laptop is probably 1440x900 (a widescreen res) and when you switch to the projector the laptop switched to 1024x768 because that is what the projector supports. 1024x768 would look stretched on a widescreen display.

My other thought was a widescreen projector doing something to the display?

I have all our new Toshibas set to non-widescreen permanently 1024x768) just to try and avoid this issue...I don't think the staff have even noticed that the icons are a bit wider than they ought to be

[witch]

NO - that's what I thought - but it is DEFINITELY set to 1024 x768 - I know this as we had issues with the projector displays and they had to be set to this otherwise the picture isnt the right size for the screen.
I know it sounds odd.
When the display is NOT shown on both laptop and screen (and yes, it is widescreen) there is no problem and no ' extra fat' icons, and it is set at 1024 x 768. Then when it shows on the screen and the icons are 'fat' the display is still set at 1024 x 768
Any other ideas?

[witch]

And in typical techie fashion - teacher turned it on today and alll is well!!!!!

I don't know why but I am going to just creep quietly away.
Thanks for the advice though - actually it helped me with another issue on a different projector, so it is all good!