Jay's IT blog

When I connected my Acer AL2216W 22″ widescreen monitor to my HP 2510p notebook, I didn’t expect there to be problems. But there was a problem: For some reason, I was unable to set the resolution to 1680×1050, which is the monitor’s native resolution.

This took some more googling to find a solution. Here’s a short summary of what I found out:

1. Open the registry editor and do a Find on “DTD”.
2. Populate every occurence of TotalDTDCount with the number 1.
3. Populate every occurence of DTD_1 with the following string:

   21 39 90 30 62 1A 27 40 68 B0 36 00 D9 28 11 00 00 1C 37 01

   and be sure to keep searching until you are sure you got them all.

4. Reboot, and 1680×1050 should become available.

Now, if you need to set another resolution, things get a bit tricky.

You need to find out the correct DTD string (see step 3) for your resolution. That can be done using a small tool called MonInfo. How to do that and how to proceed is described in this article (it’s long but worth reading); I suggest you have a look at it

If you ever need to change the user name or the serial number of your Mac Office…

remove these two files:

Office 2001:

HD/System Folder/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (9)
HD/Applications (Mac OS 9)/Microsoft Office 2001/Office/OfficePID

Office v.X:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (10)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office/OfficePID

Office 2004 (SP1):

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (11)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/OfficePID

(~ is your home directory)

The OfficePID file is hidden, so the best thing is to delete it via terminal.
The next time you start a Mac Office application, you’ll be prompted to re-enter user info and serial number, just like after the installation.

Oh and if anyone knows how to retrieve the used serial number, let me know.