November 5th, 2024

What’s the difference between Display size and Screen size in the Windows 95 display control panel?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In the Windows 95 display control panel, there was an option called “Desktop area”.

In the Windows 98 display control panel, there was an option called “Screen area”.

What’s the difference beteween “desktop area” and “screen area”?

There’s no difference. They both control the monitor resolution.

I suspect the name of the option changed because Windows 98 added support for multiple monitors. The desktop spans all monitors, but this setting controls a single monitor. This wasn’t a problem on Windows 95, which supported only a single monitor anyway, but it became incorrect when Windows 98 introduced support for multiple monitors.

But wait, what about this?

This is a screen shot of Windows 95 with both “Desktop area” and “Screen area”. What’s going on here?

What we’re seeing here is a third party display driver injecting itself into the standard control panel. Rather than doing the documented thing and adding a tab to the Desktop control panel called, say, “Virtual screen”, they decided that it would be cooler to hack into integrate into¹ the “Settings” page.²

All of these unsupported hacks created problems in Windows 98 when the team tried to add multi-monitor support, since the Windows 98 multi-monitor display control panel looked nothing like the Windows 95 one, and the attempt by the display driver to patch the Settings page failed catastrophically.

If you are still interested, you can read about how the Windows 98 team had to do extra work to keep these rogue display control panel hackers from messing up the new display control panel.

¹ This is an unauthorized and unsupported integration point, but the marketing team is not dissuaded by annoying engineering jargon like “unsupported”. “Look, our job as marketing is to come up with ideas. It is not your job as engineering to tell me that it can’t be done. Your job is to find a way to do it.”

² In this case, the third party display driver made “Display area” represent the size of the virtual screen and the “Screen area” be the size of the physical screen.

Category
Old New Thing
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History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

6 comments

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  • alan robinson 8 hours ago

    Although one can argue, compellingly, that from an end user perspective having the two sliders on the same tab is far more usable.

    I can recall using at least one if not two computers where I made use of this scrolling virtual screen setup to have 4x the desktop space (2×2). It was very handy, although modern virtual desktops are more usable I think. And multiple monitors wins hands down.

  • Isaac 13 hours ago

    I think that screenshot from Bob Pony is only visible when you’re logged in at Twitter. I don’t seen anything, and following the link I get a request to login.

  • Neil Rashbrook 14 hours ago

    I've used a driver that did this on Windows 95. They did of course release a new version which was more compatible with Windows 98 by removing the feature. I did try that version but I didn't like it for some reason so as I wasn't planning on upgrading to Windows 98 I stuck with the Windows 95 version.

    (Weirdly, I was unable to complete sign in normally, but fortunately the "Log in to vote or...

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  • Anonymous Untitled

    If my memory is not wrong, I have seen this long ago. The desktop can scroll like a RTS game. I guess the video card driver was special to enable this.

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