Re: Screen Lengths

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

I've been doing some experimenting, because we've had innumerable
questions about screen length settings here, none of which ever
seem to get resolved. One thing that occurred to me (not, alas,
the first) was that we should be well-advised to wrestle with the
Window Height settings in the Layout tab of the pif (or lnk)
properties page first, and see which take (i.e., are legitimate
for that system's VGA BIOS) before even starting to play with
Xy's SL setting.
The results were interesting. On my XP Home desktop, with an
NVidea GeForce2 MX 100/200 VGA card, running at 32-bit color at
1024X768 on a SyncMaster 1531 monitor:
Screen Buffer Height and Window Size Height of 25, 28, 34, and 43
lines take (that is, if you set them, close the window, and then
reopen it, those values are still there).
50 lines and 60 lines: the Window Size Height resets itself to
49 lines.
ON the Vista laptop, with an Intel 945GM Express chipset mobile
adaptor, running on both the built-in LCD and an HP D2806A Ergo
Ultra VGA CRT (both running 32-bit color at 1024X768)
25, 28, 34, 38, and 50 lines all take
60 lines resets to 59 if the font is my usual 12-point Lucida
Console. BUT if I lower the font to 10 point, and reset the
Window Length Height to 60, it takes. (This is all on the LCD;
haven't tested--it is tedious in the extreme--on the CRT yet.)
That would seem to indicate that Windows is doing some sort of
calculation that takes account of both font size and Window Size
Height.

A few other points:
1. It appears that one must use the up and down arrows, not
merely delete or backspace and retype the number, to change the
values. Deleting and retyping has a far higher percentage of
values that don't take.
2. Much as I hesitate to differ (on a matter of computers, at
least) with Robert, who said, a while back, that Screen Buffer
Size was irrelevant, it seems to be necessary, under XP at least,
to increase that as well as Window Size height to get the values
to take.
4. All these changes _must_ be done by right-clicking the
titlebar of the open DOS prompt, ->Properties->fonts and layout
tabs. Right-clicking on the desktop shortcut gets you nowhere.
Oh, you can input changes, but they none of them take.
If anyone who knows what hardware he or she is running on (it's
easy enough to find out: Control Panel->Device Manager->Display
adaptors; right click, Properties; Some VGA cards have a further
settings tab) and can tell us what Window Height sizes they have
gotten to stick, we might discern a pattern: maximum sizes
supported by certain chipsets or certain resolutions, say.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx