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Change the Safe Mode Screen Resolution in Windows XP

Posted by John Almirante on Tuesday, March 23, 2010
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I found that the display resolution, while in Safe Mode on my Windows XP computer, was not supported by an older monitor I switched to. After some research and troubleshooting, I was able to change the Safe Mode screen resolution by searching for the registry values "DefaultSettings.XResolution" and "DefaultSettings.YResolution" and changing the DWORD data.

Some time ago, I was planning on switching the LCD monitors of two of my computers.  One had a resolution of 1280x800 while the other one had 1024x768.  Before I switched the monitors, I made sure to change the screen resolution of both machines to the lowest allowed by Windows XP, which was 800x600. 

This was to ensure that the desktop screen resolution could be displayed by either monitor without me knowing the highest resolution that the monitors could support.  If I didn't do this beforehand, I would need to go into Safe Mode to change the screen resolution after the switch.  After switching monitors, I simply changed the desktop resolution to the highest supported by each monitor.

What I didn't realize was that, previously, I had somehow set the Safe Mode resolution to the highest that was supported by the higher resolution monitor.  Since I didn't have a need to enter Safe Mode at that time, or for a long time afterwards, and because I had a long-held assumption that Safe Mode would choose a lower video resolution if the monitor didn't support a higher resolution, I did not check whether I could successfully boot into Safe Mode.

After much time had passed, when I finally needed to go into Safe Mode on the computer that was now using a lower resolution monitor, I found out that the monitor would now only display an "Out of Range" message when I tried to boot into Safe Mode.  After a lot of worries and time spent doing trial and error and research, I learned that you can set the display resolution in Safe Mode and that this machine was displaying a resolution that was unsupported by the monitor.

Safe Mode is not only fixed to 800x600 or to the highest resolution supported by your monitor.  If you set the Safe Mode screen at a higher resolution, it will display that resolution each time you boot into Safe Mode until you do change the screen resolution again.  Here is a website that shows you how to change your screen resolution in Safe Mode:

How to Change Screen Resolution and Display Colors Quality in Safe Mode of Windows

Take note, this only changes the screen resolution of Safe Mode and not the normal mode of Windows. 

Normally, when in Safe Mode and you change the screen resolution in the Settings tab of the Display Properties dialog, and then immediately afterwards, press Apply and/or OK, you are actually changing the resolution of your normal mode desktop.  This allows you to change the screen resolution of your normal desktop if in case it is somehow set to an unviewable resolution.

When you click on Advanced before pressing Apply and/or OK in the Display Properties dialog and then click OK in the next dialog, that is the point when the Safe Mode resolution is changed instead.

I had no problem with the resolution in normal mode.  My problem was that I was unable to change the resolution in Safe Mode because I couldn't see my desktop while I was in Safe Mode.  Choosing VGA Mode only boots you to normal mode although with lower resolution video drivers.  What I needed was to be able to boot into Safe Mode with a lower screen resolution.

On the other machine, I tried changing the Safe Mode screen resolution and comparing the registry before and after the changes were made.  After some analysis, I found that the registry values "DefaultSettings.XResolution" and "DefaultSettings.YResolution" contained the DWORD data that had changed.

I searched the registry for all of the values containing DefaultSettings.XResolution and DefaultSettings.YResolution and changed all the data to the corresponding lower resolution in hexadecimal, from 1280x800 to 1024x768.  After doing the changes to the registry, I was able to reboot into Safe Mode and was finally able to view the desktop.
 

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