Fine Tune ClearType Font Smoothing

Cleartype in XP is perfect on my desktops and laptops. The problem with Windows 7 is no matter how you adjust it, text always looks blurry. It gives me eye strain.

It seems to me as the setting never changes. The only Cleartype setting that dosent strain my eyes is the grayscale version and even when I choose it from the Cleartype tuner it still uses the default setting.

I agree with both of the last two comments. The last OS I used before Win7 was Win98 - long before such things as ClearType and all I say is: What's the point? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Now, it seems that nothing changes depending on the options you selected, but upon closer inspection (by taking screen captures and examining them closely in an image viewer) you can see minute differences in the text within the Text Tuner. I found that in order to get my text to look like it should, I had to pretty much do just that (zoomed-in screen captures). With this method, you're pretty much looking for the option that most represents the least change with a preference towards shadowing and no color added. Of course, you may have to run Text Tuner multiple times since each option affects the next set of options that is displayed to you. Sadly, disabling ClearType isn't an option since it really makes the text look horrible (I don't know why).

They say this is so LCD monitors can display the text properly, but I say BS. My monitor has no problem displaying fonts that weren't designed for ClearType and they look every bit as sharp as they did in Win98 on a CRT monitor. My best advice if ClearType is really bugging you or giving you eyestrain, then change what fonts your programs and the Windows UI displays and choose non-ClearType fonts. Of course, this is just speculation on my part as I haven't bothered to do so myself since it seems that every program seems to handle the fonts differently. Even the Windows UI itself appears to handle the fonts differently between the desktop, start menu, and explorer windows. And by handle differently, I mean that ClearType is more or less noticeable depending on the program or UI function displaying it. Very odd.