Information about Linux is here: http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=252

fab_programmer123 wrote:

I have installed Scratch on an older computer with a display smaller than listed above, and now I can't see all of Scratch, just part of it. Is there any way to fix this?

try changing your monitor settings, make the screen smaller so you can see all of it, i hope this helps!

i wasn't able to get it working at 800x600...maybe someone else knows a workaround for that.

The scratch team, like most of the MIT educational software groups, is unaware of the dire situation of ancient computers in many classrooms.  They decided to ignore the problem of 600x800 displays and hope that it goes away.

havaco wrote:

Hello,
All the computers in our school have 15" display.
The hardware allows for a 600 x 800 resolution only.
Thus I cannot teach Scratch, a real shame.
I saw other people comments about this problem,
but never saw an answer about it.
Will this be fixed in the near future?
Or I have to forget about using the software with my students?

Sorry to hear that. During the design process the Scratch Team decided to focus on 1024x768, however we might see a version of Scratch for lower resolution next year.
Mainly to support the XO.

A lot of schools cannot afford new computers and are using older ones that were donated by individuals or businesses that no longer needed them.

It is not polite to laugh at people because you are richer than they are.

Yes, we do know of people using Scratch on Vista. What problems do you have?

Sounds like your monitor resolution is set too low.  Right-click on an empty area of the desktop and look for Properties or Settings, something like that.  See if you can find the display resolution and bump it up to 1024 x 768 or larger.

Many OS's will support screen magnifiers.  And some video cards can be flexible in how they display an OS's interface (with options for increasing font sizes, or expanding the 'desktop' and allowing you to see one zoomed in area at a time).

MS Windows features a "screen magnifier" that is usually listed under 'Accessibility' but which can also be started from the Run window by typing magnifier.  Its okay, but there are even better assistive technologies out there (most for a price)...
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/at/

Does anyone have experience with any they'd recommend?

I just have to mention that while Scratch works on slow computers, the things I make in Scratch tend to lag even on my really nice duo core laptop with 2 gigs of ram and windows XP...

Scratch could use some optimization as well when you are busy messing with Scratch to fix the resolution problem.

About that resolution problem. May I suggest tabs with the ability to show and hide the four workareas as you please? It's a bit less frustrating than scrolling. Sometimes I wish I could make the preview window smaller to mess around with the scripts with less scrolling that doesn't respond to the mouse scroll wheel. On second thought, support for the scroll wheel would be even better.

im run scratch sucessfully on my ol 80x386 with Windows 3.1 Lol!!!


John Nas

[kevin_karplus: advertising removed from signature]

Last edited by kevin_karplus (2008-01-24 20:48:00)

is scratch good for windows xp?