ClearType and WinXP fonts

I got my new T41 ThinkPad a few days ago – but I was a little disappointed with the screen.

Compared to my T40, the T41 was nice a bright, but the fonts seemed a little blury – difficult to focus on and I found my eyes getting tired pretty quickly.

I wondered whether there was some screen resolution or font size setting that was wrong, but I couldn’t find anything.

I was resigned to having to send the machine back to support to get them to replace the obviously faulty screen – which is annoying given how busy I am at the moment – in fact I’m away so much that I really wound’t be able to get this addresses until November, meaning I won’t be able to swap to using the T41 as my primary machine like I intended (it would have to serve as my demo system).

But then, I got an email from one of my colleagues yesterday who was complaining about having difficulty with fonts and he found a setting in WinXP that enables a feature called “ClearType”.

Under the Control Panel -> Display Settings -> Appearance -> Effects, there is the option to use “ClearType” or “Standard” font smoothing.

Now, I checked the options on my T41 and T40 and found that my T40 was using “Standard” mode, while the T41 was using “ClearType” !! I turned ClearType off on the T41 and the fonts jumped into sharp focus !!!!! Yipee !

Just to double check, I enabled ClearType on the T40 and it displayed the same characteristics as my T41 had.

Ironically, my colleague was suggesting we enable ClearType to help make fonts more readable, but I found it worked much better with it disabled. Must be because my eyes are much better (and younger) than his :D

I’m very happy now, this means I can get on with building my T41 up as my new primary workstation.

Here’s what the difference between them is:

Standard mode:

ClearType enabled:

Standard mode – zoomed in:

ClearType enabled – zoomed in:

So there you go. I suggest that you experiment on your own system to find which option suits you better !