Quick tweaks improve your monitor, speed
In just a few clicks, you can improve the appearance of items on your screen, make things easier for your eyes, and get peppier performance out of your PC.
Making adjustments to settings, and turning various things on or off, is known as “tweaking”, and sometimes “optimizing”. And being a Geek, I love to tweak my machines until they’re running like a Indy 500 car. Today’s quick tip will take you all of 45 seconds to do, and it will give you noticeable results.
Tip of the Day: Turn on font smoothing, and turn off special effects.
The settings we’re going to tweak are all found on the Appearance tab of your Display Properties: right-click on a blank area of your Desktop and select “Properties”
On the “Appearance” tab, click on the “Effects” button.
Here we’re going to turn one item on, and three off, by placing or removing checkmarks.
1) Turn on the ClearType font smoothing feature by placing a check in its checkbox, and using the drop-down arrow to set it to ClearType. This will make reading easier, and reduce headache-causing eye strain.
2) Turn off the “bells-and-whistles” special effects that, while ‘modern’ and ‘cool’, really only slow things down quite unnecessarily. (aka “waste system resources”)
* uncheck “transition effects”
* uncheck “shadows”
* uncheck “show windows contents while dragging”
3) Click OK, and OK again.
That’s it. You’re done. Easy, right? Right. Should you change your mind someday, undoing these changes is just as easy.. just place a check again. (But I very much doubt you will!)
Today’s free link: Loyal fans of this series know that I am obsessed with advising folks to make backup copies of their computer files in case of a failure; and that I wrote that one option was to use a “online” storage solution (as one of your two locations)(read Online Storage for Data Backup).
There’s a new service out called BackBlaze that is worth checking out. Click here to read a review of the “World’s easiest online backup” (and download link).
Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.
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• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
Note: You are responsible for using this blog and its content. I am in no way liable for any losses caused by user error, viruses and/or other malware, hardware or software failure, or any other conceivable reason.
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