Need help adjust my LCD monitor?

[hooked]

Definite apologies to twopu for the hijack!

And thanks GMCloud. I'm looking forward to Vista.

[twopu]

Please don't apologies, I'm learning a lot. To be honest I'm learning that I don't know much about computers. I don't know what a Virtual PC is or what Vista is. I'm going to have to find an idiots guide to computers. Please continue and hopefully I'll start understanding.

Oh, maybe I'm not use to having an LCD, but my eyes hurt a bit almost to the point where I can see myself getting a headache after working on it for hours. Will this go away or can I adjust anything? I've turned down the brightness but that doesn't seem to help.

[hooked]

Some people do have an adjustment period when switching from crt to lcd. I know people at work that keep their laptop resoultions low to keep the larger text and live with the fuzzy text. I don't keep my brightness/contrast at the highest setting so I don't burn a hole in my retinas.

Have you tried turning on the ClearType (as someone else suggested?) If you don't know how, let me know.

Also, Windows Vista is the next version of Windows. You are probably running Windows XP right now. Vista has many upgraded features to the underlying systems and graphics. This will put a strain on older machines with not a lot of memory and harddrive space. As I mentioned in my other posts, if you have an older graphics card, you will not be able to activate some of the newer graphics capabilities of Vista.

Virtual PC is a software that creates a software version of a pc on your own pc. It looks and acts like a physical machine, but it is all running in the Virtual PC software. It requires a lot of cpu, memory and harddrive space. But it comes in handy if you want to load something new but you don't want to risk screwing up your own machine. For instance, I've used VPC to install Windows Vista just to see how it works and I didn't have to try and find a spare PC to load it on. As I mentioned before, I loaded the Beta version of IE7 on a virtual image of Windows XP just in case I couldn't recover back to IE6 if I didn't like it or it didn't work.

[GMCloud27]

Just a quick note for you twopu, I read through this topic again and was surprised that nobody has mentioned turning up the display DPI (dots per inch) from 90 dpi to 120 dpi. What this will do Twopu is increase the text size throughout windows to make it easier to read. Many manufacturers such as Dell use 120dpi for their laptops on default and let the user change it back down to windows default (90). Try giving this a shot and see what happens.

1.) Right-click on your desktop (the mainspace in windows that displays your icons and wallpaper) and select "Properties"

2.) Click on the "Settings" tab and then select the "Advanced" button.

3.) The default tab should be "General" which in this tabs shows a section labeled "Display" and a box that says 90 dpi. Select the drop down box and choose 120 dpi. Hit the "Apply" button at the bottom of the dialog. Windows may prompt you to insert your XP Installation CD if it cannot find the files needed. If they exist, it'll say something in the lines of "Would you like to skip recopying the files over via CD and use the existing ones" and hit yes. If this happens the dialog will close. Now reopen it via the Advanced button again and click on 90 dpi, then click on the box again and click 120 dpi and hit "Apply." This is a strange bug I noticed when doing this a few minutes ago on an XP SP2 machine and thought I'd mention it in detail for ya. You may then want to change your display resolution to its native size (probably 1280x1024) to clean up the picture.

Hope that may help a little!

[twopu]

Thanks for the tip GMCloud27. It worked on Office applications, unfortunately the text is still small when I'm online with a 1280 x 1024 resolution. I've tried changing the text size but only certain things enlarge. I'll keep trying