increase screen refresh rate for external monitor?

My external monitor display is "wavy" or "wobbly". A colleague looked at my screen and told me that this is probably bad for my eyes. Will increasing the refresh rate fix this problem? How do I do this in ubuntu 14.04?

1 Answer

You have to use Terminal. Open it by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T and then run xrandr.

You might get something like:

xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1024 x 768
default connected 1024x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm
N°:0 1024x768 60.0 87.0*
N°:1 1024x576 60.0
N°:2 960x600 60.0
N°:3 960x540 60.0
N°:4 800x600 85.0 75.0 72.0 60.0 56.0

Then you can choose from the resolutions and refresh rates listed above. The following line of code changes to 1024x768 at 60Hz:

xrandr -s 0 -r 60

Where -s will change your resolution to the the one specified in the number zero and -r will change your refresh rate to 60Hz.