![]() To load a theme and replace your current settings, select a theme from the drop-down Theme list and click the Apply button. Manage themes by opening the Display control panel and clicking the Themes tab. There’s only one place in Windows to save and retrieve themes, and your theme selection affects settings in several dialogs. Themes let you save several individual settings under a single name. From Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition However, since higher color depths may cause your applications to run a little more slowly and eat up more system memory, you may want to downshift to 16-bit color. In most cases, choose the highest color depth your system supports at whatever resolution you’re currently using. Most newer cards easily exceed these restrictions, though, so the case may be moot. The card’s refresh rate can also limit the maximum resolution and color depth. Therefore, a video card with 8 MB of memory will be able to handle the display setting, but a card with only 4 MB will not. If you’re in 32-bit color mode, each pixel will require 32 bits, or 4 bytes (there are 8 bits to a byte). The memory required by a particular setting is calculated by multiplying the horizontal size times the vertical size times the bytes per pixel. The amount of memory on your video card dictates the maximum color depth and resolution you can use. Select the highest color quality setting your video hardware supports (at least Medium 16-bit).Īs you adjust your color depth, Windows may automatically adjust other settings depending on your card’s capabilities, especially if you’re using an older video card. ![]() To the right is a drop-down list labeled “Color quality” with all of the color depth settings your video card supports. Move the Screen resolution slider to the right to increase your display’s resolution (more dots equals more screen real estate, but smaller screen elements). ![]() To set the color depth, open the Display control panel and choose the Settings tab. This results in a richer, faster display web pages, games, and photos look better and you don’t have to put up with a constantly changing palette. However, since 65,536 colors (16-bit mode, or 2 16 colors sometimes called High Color) are sufficient to display photographic images (as are the even better 24- and 32-bit modes), the palette is fixed and does not have to adapt to what is on the screen. The more images are displayed, the more horrendous things can look. Because 256 isn’t nearly enough to represent all the colors in the spectrum, Windows simply chooses the best 256 colors each time you display an image. When your display is set to 256 colors, there can never be more than 256 individual colors in use at any given time. Have you ever noticed that photos appear excessively grainy or contain ugly bands or streaks where a smooth sky or gradient should appear? Do all the colors on your screen become distorted when new images or web pages are displayed? These are symptoms of an adaptive palette. Do the same for Inactive Title Bar, Menu, Message Box, Palette Title, and Tooltip. Start by clicking Active Window in the little preview window at the top of the dialog box shown in Figure 1-3 (or selecting Active Title Bar from the Item list), and then choosing a larger number in the Size list in the second row (next to the Font list). ![]() From the “Font size” drop-down, you can choose either Large or Extra Large, but for better results, click the Advanced button to enlarge specific elements (title bar, menus, tooltips, etc.) to your taste. To make text bigger, right-click an empty area of your desktop, click Properties, and then click the Appearance tab. THE FIX: Depends on how much you spent! But the good news is that you can make most things on your screen bigger to compensate for the tiny pixels. THE ANNOYANCE: I spent a lot of cash for the best, highest-resolution flat-panel LCD display on the market, but everything on the screen is too small.
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