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How to change Windows screen resolution using a command line

By Koder - Posted on 01 April 2009

Have you ever gotten into a situation where your windows screen resolution gets altered unexpectedly? You try and fix it by going to display manger, but the display is so huge (screen resolution is set so small), that you can't even see the OK button because it won't fit on your monitor? What can you do now? You can try using your keyboard and try tabbing to it, but you would have to second guess how many tabs you need.

There is a third party freeware tool called NirCmd that you can use to do this using a Windows command line. Simply copy the NirCmd.exe file to the C:\Windows directory, or any place that is included in your Windows System Path. Next, open a command prompt by clicking on Start -> run -> type cmd in the box and hit enter. A black window would pop up, on the window type the following command without the quotes to change the display to 1024 x 768 with a 24 bit color depth:

nircmd.exe setdisplay 1024 768 24

The nircmd is a very useful utility that can do many of the tasks using a command line. The command line execution of these common windows tasks can be very useful if you want to implement them in a batch file or any startup scripts that run on machine starts, user log ons or just as a part of Active Directory Group Policy script. The nircmd utility can be downloaded from its website at http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html and can also perform the following command line actions in addition to changing the screen resolution:

Open or close your CD ROM tray

Set system volume to max

Mute System Volume

Unmute system volume

Turn off the monitor

Turn on the screen saver

Turn off all computers specified in a text file

Dial to "My Internet connection"

Disconnect from "My Internet connection"
Make your Internet Explorer windows 75% transparent !
Minimize all your Internet Explorer windows
Close all your Internet Explorer windows
Close all your Explorer windows (My Computer, folders, and so on)
Hide all your Internet Explorer windows
Show all your Internet Explorer windows (after you made them hidden with previous example)
Center all top-level windows
Remove the title bar of My Computer window
Return the title bar of My Computer window that we removed in the previous example
Create a shortcut on your desktop that closes all your Internet Explorer windows
Create a shortcut on your desktop that hides all your Internet Explorer windows
Create a shortcut on your desktop that shows back all your Internet Explorer windows
Hide the start button on the system tray
Show the start button on the system tray
Hide the clock on the system tray
Show the clock on the system tray
Kill (terminate) all instance of Internet Explorer processes
Disable the screen saver
Enable the screen saver
Change the date/time of the specified filename (creation time and modified time)
Create all folders specified in "c:\temp\folders.txt". The folder path names are separated by CRLF characters.
Clear the clipboard
Empty the recycle bin in all drives.
Answer 'Yes' to a standard Windows message-box
Wait 2 seconds, and then save the current screen to shot.png