by bluephin

Created on: July 15, 2008

If you are more acquainted with Windows XP, adjusting display settings in Vista could be a bit challenging if you are going to do it for the first time. However, you cannot do without the knowledge because being an essential aspect of computing, your display is one of the most important as this can affect the health of your eyesight.

You can access the interface for changing display settings in Vista in two ways:

FIRST, right click on your desktop and choose Personalize from the context menu.
SECOND, click on Start Control Panel Personalization.

Now that you've got the interface open and ready to go, let's start with touring you around the Personalization window and what you can do with it.

ADJUST WINDOW COLOR AND APPEARANCE

You can select from a range of colors available according to your taste by simply click on the radio button under the color. Tick or untick on the Enable transparency checkbox if you want your window bar to appear transparent and to what extent. Adjust the color intensity by clicking on the slider and dragging it to how you want the settings to be. Make adjustments on the hue, brightness and saturation of the colors by clicking on Show Color Mixer and adjust the scales as desired.

Alternatively, you can also click on the Open classic appearance properties for more color options link to open another window where you can select from a list of pre-defined color schemes. Click on the Effects button to add in more style to your windows and how they open and display the font for any displayed texts. The Advanced button will bring up another window that will allow you to change colors and fonts for each individual window items like the desktop, icons, title bar, etc.

DESKTOP BACKGROUND

Browse through your folders for pictures you want to use as your desktop background. You can select a file with image format such as JPEG, GIFF and BMP among many others. After selecting the picture, set it's position by selecting in the 3 options (tiled, centered or stretched).

SCREENSAVER

The screensaver is what is displayed on your screen when it is in idle mode or not in use. This prevents the burning of the monitor. Select from a list of pre-set screen savers which you can also personalize using the Settings button. Set the wait interval by putting in the number of minutes that the system is idle before the screen saver activates. You can also tell the system to direct you to ask for log in after the first time you come off the idle state.

THEME

A set of predefined themes is available for you to select from. Your selected theme will define a combination of visual and audio settings including icons, mouse pointers, window colors, event sounds, etc.. Simply select one from the list and it's all done!

DISPLAY SETTINGS

If you are a bit familiar with display settings in XP, this is just almost the same. This allows you to adjust the resolution using the slider, select the color intensity by choosing from one of those among the list (highest 32 bit, medium bit, depending on the graphics card that you have on) and play around with advanced settings using the Advanced button. Whatever is in the properties page of the Advanced button would now depend on what graphics card you have on, so it would be useless to iterate them one by one here.

Just don't be afraid to play around with it as you could always tune it back to its default settings if you must need to. A little tweak here and a little adjustment there and you would get the desired display settings that your eyes would love.

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