Displays

From HelpDeskWiki

General

There are several mouse settings, in the Mouse control panel option, that may make the mouse pointer more visible, especially on older flat-panel displays. One is the trail option, which causes older images of the mouse to remain behind for a moment, creating a trail. Another, which is found in Windows XP, is the option to show the location of the pointer when the Ctrl key is pressed. This causes a flashing circle to momentarily appear around the mouse pointer. A large or animated animated mouse pointer may also be helpful, although an animated one may be too distracting for some people.

CRT displays

CRT displays are measured diagonally, in inches. However, this measurement is for the tube itself, not for the viewable area, thus a 19" monitor may actually have a viewable measurement, after accounting for the bezel and the curvature of the bezel, of about 17-18".

Flat-panel displays

Flat-panel measurements are for the viewable area of the display, therefore a 15" flat-panel has nearly the same viewable size as a 17" CRT.

If you are familiar with older laptops, you may remember how the mouse pointer blurs and becomes almost invisible when being moved. Modern flat-panel displays have reduced this problem noticeably. This is due to something called the response time; a lower value is better. This value is especially important for game playing or for watching videos.

Flat-panel displays have something called the natural (or true) resolution. This is the resolution that the panel was designed to use; other resolutions are emulated, and therefore generally do not look as good.

Anti-aliasing is a technique to smooth the edges of lines on CRT displays. The standard anti-aliasing technique does not work well on flat-panel displays, but there is a similar technique that takes advantage of the digital nature of flat-panel displays to do an even better job. Microsoft's implementation of this is named ClearType and currently works only with fonts, and is built into Windows XP. To use an online utility to tune it on a computer, or to download a utility for tuning it offline, see Microsoft's ClearType Tuner page (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx).

If your flat-panel display and your video card both have a DVI connector, try using it, as it'll eliminate the digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion that is necessary when using the standard VGA 15-pin connector; this conversion can add fuzziness to your images.