Monitor Settings All Versions
You wouldn’t get much work done without a screen on your computer. It follows, then, that you can get more work done if you tinker with your screen’s settings to make it more appropriate to your tastes and workload. And boy, are there a lot of settings to tinker with.
Three Ways to Enlarge the Screen There are two reasons why Windows 7 introduced a quick-and-easy way to magnify everything on the screen. First, people tend to get older—even you. Come middle age, your eyes may have trouble reading smaller type. Second, the resolution of computer screens gets higher every year. That is, more and more dots are packed into the same-sized screens, and therefore those dots are getting smaller, and therefore the type and graphics are getting smaller. Microsoft finally decided enough was enough. That’s why, in Windows 7, there’s a one-click way to enlarge all type and graphics, with crisp, easier-to-see results. There are also various older schemes for accomplishing similar tasks. Here’s a rundown of all of them: Change the resolution Your screen can make its picture larger or smaller to accommodate different kinds of work. You perform this magnification or reduction by switching among different resolutions (measurements of the number of dots that compose the screen). When you use a low-resolution setting, such as 800 × 600, the dots of your screen image get larger, enlarging (zooming in on) the picture—but showing a smaller slice of the page. Use this setting when playing a small movie on the Web, for example, so that it fills more of the screen. At higher resolutions, such as 1280 × 1024, the screen dots get smaller, making your windows and icons smaller but showing more overall area. Use this kind of setting when working on two-page spreads in your page-layout program, for example. Unfortunately, adjusting the resolution isn’t a perfect solution if you’re having trouble reading tiny type. On a flat-panel screen—that is, the only kind sold today—only one resolution setting looks really great: the maximum one. That’s what geeks call the native resolution of that screen. That’s because on flat-panel screens, every pixel is a fixed size. At lower resolutions, the PC does what it can to blur together adjacent pixels, but the effect is fuzzy and unsatisfying. (On the old, bulky CRT monitors, the electron gun could actually make the pixels larger or smaller, so you didn’t have this problem.)
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windows 7: the missing manual