I clean installed Mint 17 32-bit onto this machine

Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo V5535

Everything works fine except the screen has large , low-res icons and text
.... just like in Windows safe-mode .

I'm no stranger to Mint ( or Linux in general ) but I've just not seen this before.

I've done the exact same thing on other old 32-bit rigs , without any snags

A look around the web shows possible driver issues , or problem with xorg.

Have I missed something stupidly obvious ?

Any hints will be appreciated.

What graphics card do you have?
Can you post the output of "lspci"?

I'm not familiar with Mint, but look around the menu for a "Monitor settings" or "display settings" tool to adjust the resolution. Does that fix the issue, or is the low resolution the only option?

Google shows it has a SiS Mirage 3 video system, I suspect this is the issue as it's quite old and probably not supported well...

Thanks for posting guys.

FWIW , I've got the original HDD with Win XP on it .... if I boot off that there are no graphics problems at all .

The strange thing is that Mint is usually outstandingly good at having / grabbing the correct drivers for everything .

It's no biggie... a project really ....

I've got a bunch of old machines and some elderly relatives who would love to have internet at minimal cost.

Putting Mint on these machines seemed a good idea .... easy to use , booting is super-fast ... what's not to like ?

EDIT
Graphics card is 256MB SiS Mirage 3

That's nice... but have you tried the suggestions?

Err .... no

I'm currently working on 3 machines at the same time , I'll check out the suggestions and post back ...

.... thanks again !

Mint is not a light and lean system and may not be the best choice for really old hardware. I suspect MX-14, antiX, or Linux Lite (in that order) would be a better choice to wring performance from the old boxes...