Your monitor resolution is a measurement of how many pixels your monitor displays. If you lean in REAL close to your monitor, you should see little squares or lines that you can't notice from even a foot away. Those are pixels, and they are arranged in dots and lines. Lines going across, and dots going up and down. Your resolution measures how many of those dots and lines are displayed on the screen. The more you have, the sharper the image will be, and the smaller it will be.

If you want, you can change or check your resolution by minimizing all your windows, right clicking on your desktop, selecting properties, going to the settings tap, and adjusting the slider there. If you enter a resolution you can't see well in, or one that doesn't work with your monitor, it will reset automatically back to the last resolution if you give it a few seconds.

All the images in my gallery are rendered in 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, and 1600 x 1200 resolution sizes. These are the most common resolutions, and if you computer doesn't match one of these, simply pick the next size up. Images can be shrunk without a loss of quality (from 1600 x 1200 to 1280 x 960 for example), but they cannot be enlarged (going from 1024 x 768 to 1280 x 960 for example) without becoming blocky.

If you notice, I said this site is designed to be viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution. 1024 x 768 is pretty common, and it means there are 768 lines going across and 1024 dots on each line. (786,432 pixels total). If you're viewing my site in 1024 x 768 resolution, it should fill the entire browser window. If you were to change to a higher resolution, however, my site would seem to shrink inside the browser, as would your icons and any other programs you use. This is because the site is built to display 1024 pixels wide. If you increase your resolution to, say, 1600 x 1200, you're now seeing 1600 dots on 1200 lines.

Why would anyone want to shrink what they see? Because, even though it's smaller, it's of higher quality. Here's a good example.

These are the EXACT same image, only the sizes have changed. Notice how the large image is blocky (called pixilated), while the smaller image is clear? This is due to resolution. When the image is shrunk, it's apparent quality increases because you don't notice all the pixelation.