Tweaking the display settings for Windows 7 / 8

Ok, I have trashed Windows Seven a lot lately, and a few of you have different views ...

Windows Seven, and Vista the video properties are different from XP and older versions of Windows. MS has split off the different sections for the settings from one applet to four separate pages in the control panel. The idea is if you can't find it you can't change it. Or is it to annoy the end user which normally is the computer owner.

So what is neat about Windows 7?

Other than putting the display settings in several different places there are some nice things about them in Windows Seven.

Well for one I like the task bar pinning.

This feature showed up in XP but the pinning wasn't an Icon, it was the Icon and the text label.

One of the draw backs to using the pinning in XP was that if you had a lot of program shortcuts on the task bar it started to take up real estate on your desktop.

One way around this eating of the desktop was to let the task bar hide and then popup when the mouse was moved to that area.

I saw a desktop taskbar that had every program installed on the computer on it, it was four layers deep! It used up almost a quarter of the desktop display. Not to mention 110 MB of memory to keep all those short cuts and ICONS running in the background!

So with Vista the label was gone and only the Icon is on the task bar, cool now you can have a lot of program short cuts pinned to it and it still is only one layer of space on the desktop.

(If you pin a document such as a word document on the task bar it will be that document but if you put a text document on the task bar then just notepad.exe will be there not your shortcut, weird. I haven't found out why it does this yet).

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Customizing the Desktop -

I found a nice program that changes the logon back ground. The Tweaks.com has a small program that will do the deed for you instead of hacking the registry, use this display settings. You make your background image the same size as your display or use a standard size if you are doing it for your business. (Remember that a laptop that has a portrait display will look squeezed when you use a standard video size such as 1280x1024) Convert or save it to the .jpg type image, then run the program, select your image and vole' your new logon back ground is there. Cool.

Sometimes you walk away from your computer, do you have a screen saver set?

You can customize the screen saver to come on after a certain amount of time. You can also put your favorite saying or company name on the screen saver also. To customize just go to the Control Panel then Personalization, the select Screen Saver. Then select the type of Screen Saver, to use a company name select 3D text, to select a company logo (must be a .gif image) select Photos, and then set the speed, size, etc with the settings button.

If you don't have it set check the box 'On resume, display logon screen', this will lock the computer when the screen saver comes on. Security!

We learn something new about display settings every day ...