Just press a key or click the mouse to stop it from running. Between those two sources alone, you have access to more than 2, screen savers. Plus, most of the screen savers designed for Windows 3. In addition to selecting the screen saver du jour, you should also define the length of time the system must be idle before the screen saver is launched, as well as whether to display Welcome screen or return to the desktop when the system is resumed that is, when the keyboard or mouse is activated by a user.
The Energy Star settings for monitors are covered under the Power applet discussion. If you are working from a portable system or are an energy conservationist why do you have a computer in the first place? This opens the Power Options Properties dialog box, which is a Control Panel applet in its own right. The Power Options applet is discussed a bit later in this chapter. From the Appearance tab see Figure You can do some serious mischief here, creating some egregious color schemes that will attract the fashion police.
Or you can design or choose schemes that improve readability on screens or eyes with certain limitations. If, perchance, you're using a monochrome monitor no color , altering the colors may still have some effect the amount depends on how you installed Windows , so these settings are not just for systems with color screens. The Display Properties dialog box, Appearance tab. In most cases your desktop is set to the Windows XP style by default, which is fine for most screens and users.
If you prefer the stylings of Windows , you can go retro by selecting Windows Classic style from the Windows and buttons pull-down list. The Windows Classic style offers all of the color scheme pre-defined options you remember, such as Desert, Eggplant, and Wheat. But even if you stick with the new XP styling, there is the default, Olive Green, and Silver color schemes, and even these can be customized through the Advanced button.
The final pull-down selection box on this tab is Font size. I bet you can guess what it's for. So, if you have trouble reading the names of icons or dialog boxes, increase the size of the font! Whether menus and ToolTips are animated or not, and whether the animation is fade or scroll. Set to Fade effect by default. Whether screen fonts are smoothed using the standard Windows method, or using ClearType. ClearType often improves the visibility range on older LCD displays.
The Standard method is selected by default. Whether to hide the underlined letters for keyboard shortcuts until the Alt key is pressed. Enabled by default. The Advanced button opens the Advanced Appearance dialog box, which is used to alter the color settings, component size, and fonts of each individual component of a windowed display.
By using the various pull-down lists or clicking in the preview area, you can fine-tune the color and font scheme. If you spend considerable time creating a color, component, and font styling, be sure to save it as a theme on the Themes tab.
Otherwise, if you switch to another view, even for a second, you'll lose all of your previous settings. Choosing a color called Other brings up the Color Refiner dialog box this is true on the Desktop tab as well. You work with two color mix controls here. One is the luminosity bar which looks like a triangle arrow pointing left , and the other is the color refiner cursor which looks like a set of crosshairs.
You simply drag around these cursors one at a time until the color in the box at the lower left is the shade you want. As you do so, the numbers in the boxes below the color refiner change.
Saturation is the degree of purity of the color; it is decreased by adding gray to the color and increased by subtracting gray. You also can type in the numbers or click the arrows next to the numbers if you want, but using the cursors is easier. When you like the color, you can save a color for future use by clicking Add to Custom Colors.
On the Settings tab see Figure The Display Properties dialog box, Settings tab. Unless you have a very fast computer or an intelligent co-processed AGP video card, you will find that running in true color at a high resolution, such as x, can be annoying if you have Show window contents while dragging turned on. When you move a window, it moves jerkily across the screen. If you play videos such as QuickTime, MPEG, or RealPlayer movies, you'll also notice that these higher color depths can slow down the movies or make them play jerkily.
Try using a setting of bit color depth aka "high color" for movies and photos. If you don't view movies and photos but only do non-photographic tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, and so forth, you might even want to try colors.
Assuming that Windows XP has properly identified your video display card and that the correct driver is installed, the Color Quality drop-down list box should include all the legitimate options your card is capable of. Your color depth options are limited by the amount of video RAM on the card and the resolution you choose.
The higher the resolution, the more memory is used for pixel addressing, limiting the pixel depth number of colors that can be displayed per pixel. With many modern cards, this limitation is no biggie, and it's likely that many Windows XP users will not have to worry about it except in cases when they have large monitors displaying x and want bit color and a high refresh rate. If you find that setting the color scheme up to high color or true color causes the resolution slider to move left, this is the reason.
All modern analog color monitors for PCs are capable of displaying 16 million colors, which is dubbed true color. If you've changed the screen area only to find that you can no longer see some icons or open windows on the desktop, see "Where Did Those Icons Go?
You must click the Apply button before the changes are made. When you do, you are warned about the possible effects. The good thing about the no-reboot video subsystem, first introduced with Windows 98, is that the driver settings should revert within 15 seconds unless you accept them. So, if the screen goes blank or otherwise goes bananas, just wait. It should return to the previous setting.
If, after toying with the screen resolution, you notice that your once-speedy computer seems to have lost its zip, see "Moving in Slow Motion" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.
The Screen resolution setting makes resizing your desktop a breeze. Obviously, we all want to cram as much on the screen as possible without going blind. This setting lets you experiment and even change resolution on-the-fly to best display whatever you're working on. Some jobs, such as working with large spreadsheets, databases, CAD, or typesetting, are much more efficient with more data displayed on the screen. Because higher resolutions require a trade-off in clarity and make onscreen objects smaller, you can minimize eyestrain by going to a lower resolution, such as x pixels a pixel is essentially one dot on the screen.
If you find the dialog box doesn't let you choose the resolution you want, drop the color palette setting down a notch and try again. All laptop and notebooks and an ever-increasing percentage of desktop computers have LCD monitors these days. Unlike their more-versatile yet clunky CRT-based progenitors, these energy- and space-saving displays are optimized for one resolution, called their native resolution. On LCDs, I don't suggest changing the setting from the native, sometimes called suggested , resolution.
Although choosing a lower resolution will result in making screen elements larger and thus easier for some people to see it will also produce a blockier, fuzzier display. This effect is mitigated somewhat on more intelligent displays by engineering that provides anti-aliasing.
Trying a higher resolution than the native one typically will not work. There is a discrete number of pixels on the display, and these are of a predetermined size. Trying to jam more pixels on the screen, if it works at all, does so by creating a "virtual" screen that is larger than the actual one. This will require you to pan and scroll the screen image. Check the computer's or monitor's manual if you're in doubt about which external monitor resolutions are supported.
If you've connected an external TV monitor to your computer but cannot read the fonts on the screen, see "What Does That Say? If you are experiencing any problems with your video system, from pop-up errors blaming the video system, to a flickering display, to even trouble resetting the resolution and color, click on the Troubleshoot button.
This button launches the Video Display Troubleshooter. Overall, I've found the Windows XP troubleshooters worth their weight in gold. If the screen flicker really annoys you, see "Reducing Screen Flicker" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of the chapter.
Windows XP boasts the Dual View feature. Dual View allows Windows XP to display the same desktop view on two or more monitors. On a notebook where it was common to display the desktop both on the LCD panel and an external monitor, this is nothing new. But, on desktop PCs equipped with multiple video cards, you can now use multiple monitors.
The screen resolution of each monitor is controlled from the Settings tab. Just select the monitor to set the context for the screen resolution and color quality controls. Contrary to some advertising accompanying flat-panel monitors, LCDs don't give a hoot about high refresh speed.
In fact, they don't like high speeds. The main area to make changes is on the Appearance tab and includes a number of changes seen below. There are four new buttons: a skin from disk, a skin, launches the stand-alone WindowBlinds program and the Gamma Adjustment. The button now has a new screen of features. Only the button is the same. The pull-down menus include: "Windows and buttons" which displays a list of WindowBlinds Visual Styles skins , "Color scheme" includes the Substyles and "Font size" remains the same.
To change the skin, simply click on the pull-down menu under "Windows and buttons" and select the desired skin. The preview will be updated with that skin, then click on to update your desktop. Clicking will apply the changes and close Display Properties.
While clicking will abort any changes and close Display Properties. To change the substyle for the selected skin if any exist , click on the "Color scheme" pull-down menu and select the desired substyle. The preview will be updated with the new color scheme and clicking will change your desktop. If a skin doesn't have any available substyles, the pull-down menu will be grayed out. After clicking the Gamma Adjustment button, the following window opens which includes options to change the: colouring, gamma similar to contrast , invert colours and even remove all colouring i.
You can also select options from the "Default Colour Levels" pull-down menu. Clicking will save changes, while will cancel and close. Clicking the button will open the "Gamma Adjustment" window. Watch the preview change as you move the slider. If you uncheck the box at the top for "Enable Colouring", you won't be able to change the colouring.
Finally, you can also click the button to display a full colour picker window. Then click to accept the colour. Clicking or will abort and close the window. Clicking or will abort changes and close the window.
Your choices for changing the font size under the "Font size" pull-down menu are very limited. However, you can override skin settings under the button, which will be covered later under "Advanced Settings" in this Appendix. The choices in the "Font size" pull-down menu are standard Windows XP choices. To add a new skin from your hard-drive, click the button and an Explorer window will open. Use it to locate the new skin file. WBA or. ZIP file format on your computer system i. Then click to add it or to abort.
The best way to install new skins is either through Display Properties or WindowBlinds itself. To delete a skin, you must first select it from the "Windows and buttons" pull-down menu. Then click the button and confirm by selecting either to delete or to cancel. If you try to delete a skin that's currently applied to your desktop, it will instruct you to apply a different skin first.
To run the stand-alone version of WindowBlinds, simply click the button. The Display Properties window will close and the tab will be displayed. Display Properties There are different ways into Display Properties, but one of the quickest is to right-click on the open desktop no icon or window selected and select Properties.
Display Properties - Themes tab. Before WindowBlinds installed. Windows XP in a Nutshell by. Start your free trial. Name Display Properties. Synopsis Change the appearance of the Desktop and most application windows, choose ascreensaver, and change the settings of your display adapter and monitor. Description The Display Properties window allows you to configure a wide variety of settings that affect the Desktop, display, and appearance of just about anything on the screen see Figure
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