Pain In The Neck, Part 3

I finally figured out that it was the way my computer was set up that was causing all the problems. I had the monitor set on the left side of my desk to leave the center clear for papers. When I was only using it for a few hours a week it was tolerable, but when I started using it several hours a day is when it became a problem. So while my posture may not be too good, it wasn't 30 years of sitting in front of a computer that screwed me up, it was a year of reaching for the keyboard because the desk pedestal was in the way of my knees. So there is some hope I will recover from this in relatively short order.

Since I needed to move the monitor, I thought I would use this opportunity to try out the 19" LCD that I liberated from my daughter since she got her new go-to-college-toy (Mac Laptop). I spent about 20 minutes futzing with it and though it looks pretty good, I am not sure I am happy with it. When it was connected to Kathryn's machine (a virtual clone of my Dell), it looked pretty terrible. There was a shadow under the mouse pointer that would not go away. I now suspect that it may have been a "special effect" enabled by a check box somewhere. Text also looked terrible as it did when I hooked it up to my machine, but I don't have the pointer shadow.

I spent the better part of an hour surfing the web looking for advice on how to make an LCD display look decent. You wouldn't believe how much useless non-information there is out there on this subject. I finally found one site that spelled it out pretty clearly. Set the display resolution to the same as the native resolution of the display. Set the DPI setting to 120 and turn on Clear Type. I also turned down the contrast and the brightness using the controls on the display itself.

Okay, but what's the native resolution of the display? Well, it has five chrome buttons below the screen. The one in the middle is bigger and there is a green light above it. Think that might be the power switch? The two to the right have triangles on them, one pointing up, one pointing down. The ones on the left, well, they have squiggles on them. Some judicious poking brings up a menu and the native resolution: 1280 x 1024. These two buttons are supposed to number one and number two, and now that I know what they are supposed to say I can sort of make out the numbers. But then I am old.

The display is much better now. I can read the greyed out entries in the Windows menus that I could not see at all before I started futzing with this thing. I am still not sure I like this display better than the CRT. It still looks a little odd. Things look a little blurry, but they aren't. I imagine it is some trick of my eyes trying to read stuff on this LCD screen.

Update November 2016 replaced missing picture.