You say you want a resolution?

The backlight on my notebook went out yesterday (again), and so I had to find a spare monitor from a vacant cube and plug it in at work.
All was fine until I got home. We have a couple of old 14″ monitors upstairs, and I brought one in and plugged it into the notebook as I started it up.
Nada. Well, the “signal” light on the monitor turned green, but it wasn’t —
— oh. Resolution. Frelling thing doesn’t take the high-res squinty settings I usually keep my desktop at (sure, it makes stuff harder to see, but it makes so much stuff hard to see!).
Of course, it’s hard to boot up a machine and change the resolution — when you have no screen to see by (unless you know the keystrokes for Safe Mode by heart). Fortunately, the actual LCD isn’t dead, just the backlighting. So if I shine a flashlight straight at the dark screen, I can just see the windows and so forth (akin to using a match to light up a crowded room, in the dark, full of smoke). Doing that, I was able to go into Display Preferences and turn the res down to 1024×768.
I didn’t even think that it would be a problem in CoH. Ha. Yes. Yes, it was. And it was a real pain trying to get back to the “Windows” mode of visibility once I went into CoH and was confronted with another blank screen. Hrm.
There may be a way to manually tweak the resolution down outside of CoH, or pass along a command-line string to the program, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find was a program called TweakCOH, which gives you a nice windows interface to the Options screen outside of the program. With that, it was a piece of cake to lower the CoH res to 1024×768.
Which sucks as a res, given the real estate taken up by various subwindows in CoH (which I’m now used to having up), but it’s better than (literally) nothing.
I recommend TweakCOH as a standard download for any CoH user. It doesn’t do a lot, but what it does it does well, and there’s nothing else obvious to do it with.