So I graciously received a new laptop – Dell Dimension 8600 – from the company I work for. Always a happy occasion. I start it up, fire up Internet Explorer so I can start the ritualistic download of all the security patches Windows XP has and to my surprise all images in Internet Explorer look weird; jagged and as if I am using 256 color screen and no anti-aliasing. Mozilla, quickly download to compare, shows none of this problem and images are just so nice and clean.
The suspect is the fact that the new toy has a UWXGA+ – 1600×1080 resulution.
Knowing Dell’s just stellar support reputation I head directly to their user to user support forums. Many messages referring to the same problem – IE image quality, IE jagged images. Apparently the stellars from Dell told users of brand new laptops to wipe out their pristine hard drives and reinstall Windows. But one posting from an angel, or someone approaching divine recognition, referred to a very arcane registry setting:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\INTERNET_EXPLORER\MAIN\USEHR
What? This does not make sense? It is so clear and sensible – why have I not thought of USEHR before (probably use high-res or something). Setting this key to 0 from 1 and my worries were over. IE was able to show images properly again. Yay!
Hope your new laptop experiences better quality control than this Dell…
