COMPUTER - MONITOR - 27.09.2018

Setting up your monitor(s) in Windows 10

Settings

The screen settings, which can be found under Settings ; Display , come in handy in many situations.

First of all, you can adjust a number of basic settings, such as brightness and resolution. If you have installed a recent update of Windows 10, you can activate the Night Light function: this produces dimmer, warmer colours at night, helping you to sleep. You can enable this function manually or automatically at a specified time or at sunset via the Night Light settings.

Scale and Layout is a useful function when using a high-resolution screen (4K or 5K). Under Change the Sizeof text, Apps and Other Items , Windows proposes a standard scale, e.g. 150, 200 or 250%, depending on the resolution of your display. In Custom Scaling , the latest update of Windows 10 now provides a function to automatically fix older, out-of-focus programs - during our tests this worked in about half of the cases.

Tip. In Resolution , we advise choosing the recommended resolution, otherwise your screen may look blurred.

Colours and text

You can calibrate your monitor (gamma value, brightness and contrast) using the Screen Colour Calibration wizard, which you can find via Start or the Control Panel .

Tip. Run the wizard several times in order to obtain the optimal settings.

Cleartype ensures that text is displayed as clearly and smoothly as possible. Run the Adjust ClearType Text wizard, which you find in the Control Panel and via the Start menu. Check Enable ClearType and follow the wizard. It will ask you to select the text that looks best and sharpest on your monitor and calibrate it on this basis.

Multiple monitors

If you have connected an external monitor to your laptop or if you use multiple monitors, you can configure Windows 10 so as to make optimal use of this configuration. Go to Display Settings and choose the monitor you want to tune. For each monitor, you can set whether the taskbar should appear at the bottom of the screen. This taskbar is useful as it gives access to all the active programs and shortcuts on all your monitors.

Tip. Position both monitors at the same height, so that it feels as if you are using one wide screen. The free Dual Monitor Tools ( http://dualmonitortool.sourceforge.net ) lets you configure even more aspects, such as changing the wallpaper or taking snapshots of one or more displays.

Update your drivers

It’s recommended you regularly update the driver of your graphics card. This is generally done automatically via Windows Update, but the latest drivers are usually only available from the manufacturer itself, in most cases Nvidia ( http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Scan.aspx ) or ATI ( http://support.amd.com ). If you have a laptop, check out its manufacturer. If you have an external display, it pays to update the drivers of the screen itself (the inf files), which you can find on the display manufacturer’s site.