When my friend Sharlyne bought a large computer screen for her desktop computer, she ran into a dilemma. When she was close to the computer screen she wanted to have higher resolution to see everything in fine details. But when she wanted to watch movies, videos or TV shows from far away, she wanted the screen to have a low resolution so that she could read labels, buttons and menus from a distance and control them using her wireless keyboard. Going into control panel and changing the desktop screen resolution every time she wanted to watch a movie from the comfort of her bed or couch was becoming a pain. This is when I told her about a free application called Hotkey Resolution Changer. It allows you to switch from one resolution to another just by pressing a hotkey.
Hotkey Resolution Changer is a portable program for Windows. You can download it to your hard disk, extract the contents to a folder and run hrc.exe from there. It shows a message when you run it for the first time – telling you to use the emergency hotkey Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R if you get stuck with a disabled display. This hotkey will force Windows to use the original screen resolution that you had before using the Hotkey Resolution Changer.
It places an icon in the system tray and you can double-click on this icon to view, add and edit the available screen resolutions and their respective hotkeys. You can add a new resolution, by increasing the number of hotkeys by one and then edit the settings for that resolution. You can change the resolution size, number of colors and display frequency for it. You can also assign a hotkey for any of these resolutions. There is a raw-mode option which allows you to ignore the resolutions limits imposed by your display monitor. But the raw-mode option should be avoided unless very much necessary.
After you have configured your resolutions in the Hotkey Resolution Changer, you can minimize its window to the system tray and start using the hotkeys to switch back and forth from one screen resolution to another as you like. You can also right-click on its system tray icon and choose a resolution using your mouse.
Conclusion: If your work involves testing websites or software in different screen resolutions, then you can use the free Hotkey Resolution Changer program to help you quickly switch from one screen resolution to another just by using a hotkey.
You can download Hotkey Resolution Changer from http://funk.eu/hrc/.