Ways to manage screen resolution settings
We have SCCM 2007 and Windows 7 clients installed on a very wide range of hardware (about 2000 clients). How do you manage all the different resolution settings and can SCCM help?
August 19th, 2010 10:16pm
Is screen resolution a local user of local machine setting? If it's local machine you can create collections of machines based on make and model and advertise a package to set the screen res in the reg. If it's local user it won't be so easy.
John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum |
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August 19th, 2010 10:58pm
Kind of curious, but why would you want to do this? To me, it sounds like you are asking for a management headache.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys
August 19th, 2010 11:50pm
The answer is Yes and No. There are no built-in feature to control the resolution but since you can distribute scripts and registry settings it would be possible.Kent Agerlund | http://scug.dk/members/Agerlund/default.aspx | The Danish community for System Center products
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August 20th, 2010 7:32am
Kind of curious, but why would you want to do this? To me, it sounds like you are asking for a management headache.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum |
August 20th, 2010 4:59pm
All I can think of is that there is some (badly written) application out there which doesn't display correctly on anything less than 1024x768 (or something like that).
I agree with all the others -- don't manage screen resolution. You can plan to set it in your image, and if a person changes it later, that's their choice. You could of course create reports on which computers have what screen resolution.
So if you are trying to find those computers which have (for example) 800x600 so you can tell them <goofy application> won't display well, that's one thing. But managing resolution isn't something you should plan to do.
The reasons are multiple: Laptops, for example--connecting to different external monitors or to different displays when someone is doing a presentation. You're going to plan to lock them out of changing their screen resolution so that your marketing
personnel can no longer give presentations to new customers? Are you sure you really want to plan to do that? And don't forget about legal reasons--there are a lot of visually impaired people out there--I once worked with a person who had horrible
vision issues--not completely blind, but the only colors and resolution that worked was 640x480 (on a 17" screen), and he had chosen the most obnoxious colors for the highest contrast--colors which made
me dizzy in about 15 seconds; but were the best choice for him. You can't justifiably enforce a screen resolution. You can recommend, and you can setup your image to default to one you think is the best, but the individual can and should
be allowed to change it.
That said--if you've really thought through all of the legal and political ramifications, and you need to do that anyway, there's lots of little utilities out there; which you could (I suppose) advertise to computers and force them to change their resolution,
refresh rate, and color depth. Qres, ResolutionChanger -- I found those in a 5 second search. So there's probably a dozen more. Of course, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. What if you force a refresh rate that the monitor can't
support? what if you pick 32 color depth, and that is too much for that particular video card, the box blue screens? Back away, fast... and settle for reporting on existing resolutions. I wouldn't try to set.Standardize. Simplify. Automate.
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August 20th, 2010 6:39pm
Thanks for the comprehensive answer Sherry Kissinger.
In an ideal world your comment would make sense but I work in lala land where students will set a weird resolution as pranks and staff who don’t know what a desktop is. My idea is not to force a mandatory resolution, but a default resolution that will
be determined by technical personnel. Automating resolution settings is not possible because I don’t know of a way to extract and decode EDID http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ITCG/thread/7b5d5752-e032-4801-aa7d-3099873dd518/
One problem with qres (or any other utility) is that it won’t set the resolution while the computer is on the logon/lock screen. I don’t know how VMWare do it but when you resize a player or workstation window, the guest OS automatically changes
resolution whether a user is logged on or not. I will probably end up using Qres or 12noon if I manage to obtain a free license.
My idea is to setup up AD security groups for a variety of resolutions and apply them to appropriate computers. This will cause a logon script to run, setting the relevant resolution. If no security group is set, then the resolution will not be reset every
time someone logs on. How does that sound? If I could extract the EDID, I could make a lookup list of monitor and their optimal screen settings and automate the process.
August 30th, 2010 2:21pm
EDID info: oh that's another can of worms.
There are several commecial Monitor information utilities out there that interface with ConfigMgr:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/skissinger/archive/2008/08/14/how-to-gather-monitor-information-like-serial-number.aspx
Since as a school I can tell you are looking for "free",
http://sourceforge.net/users/rzander/, check out his Moniter Details WMI provider. There's a pre-requisite of a specific version of .net (I forget which specific version), but if you can fulfill that it might work fine for you to pull monitor info
that way.Standardize. Simplify. Automate.
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August 30th, 2010 2:35pm