ClearTyping?

Yes, the first topic on today's agenda is that I am back at home, and I should practice my typing a bit more. The whole exams/roadtrip/staying a week at Auntie's threw off my computer usage for quite some time. I come back to find much spyware on the house computer, slowing a 1.4GHz/WinXP down to slower performance than my 500MHz/Mandrake. I will have to redo this computer, as it is more than due.

Another interesting point is that most of the goodies I had hooked up to my 500MHz in res is now hooked up to the 1.4, these namely being the optical mouse, and the LCD flatpanel monitor. Because LCD monitors are so crisp and clear, I do find them to be easier on the eyes, as I deal with large amounts of text in my computing day. With these ultra-defined pixels comes the ability to redifine the way that anti-aliasing is done, and Microsoft has tried to do "sub pixel hinting" on text, and called it "ClearType". While this is a valiant effort, now that I return home, I find that they have just done a half-assed job of it, and it still doesn't look right. If you have an LCD monitor (laptop or flatpanel, the fat CRTs can't do sub-pixel hinting), you can go visit the ClearType Tuner in Internet Explorer only (if you're like me, and have deleted IE from your desktop, you can still run it with Start>Run>iexplore). Turn it on and watch your text be anti-aliased! Oooh, no more jaggy edges. Instead of jaggy edges, we see something else, in the form of reds and blues that edge our text! Is this the way that ClearType is supposed to work? Personally, I hate it. KDE has a little option to turn on sub-pixel hinting as well. When it comes to KDE's sub-pixel hinting, I find it is hit or miss. If the fonts are hinted improperly, you get ugly edge colours which are on par or worse than that in Windows. If the fonts are done properly, you get something that actually looks better than in Windows. Could I possibly be mistaken? With the millions that MS spends on research, am I supposed to believe that proper sub-pixel hinting should reduce jaggies at the cost of introducing some bad edge colours? Do these edge colours actually reduce eye strain and increase readability? Is it possible that the jag-less, edge colour-less fonts in KDE are actually the ones that are hinted improperly? This isn't just on my monitor, as two other people on Nootka 4th turned on their ClearType and watched their fonts go from jagged black to smoothed turqoise.

Keep in mind that I have been using Linux for the past six months, then I come home to a slower performing computer (despite being faster in specs), and had to wipe spyware/adware off my Aunt's two computers. She has a 2.6GHz and it took ~5 minutes to kill off all the popups and get IE at the Google home page (5 minutes is not an exaggeration, I'm serious, I should have taken a video, because it really was 5 minutes, I swear). I'm really learning to hate Microsoft.