my favorite description is "fisher price like"

OMG, that is so perfect. I'm now officially changing my nickname for XP from "AOL OS" to "Fischer-Price OS".

(Should have that fixed soon - although it took a trip to MS and lots of pain on Mike's part to do it)

Cool. So was it working on Rio Music Manager that prompted this?

The main reason I like XP can be summed up in one word. ClearType.

If I recall correctly, isn't ClearType just a special antialiasing system designed to work only on LCD monitors? And... more importantly... wasn't that available as a third-party product before Microsoft gobbled them up?

Or am I thinking of something different?

Why hate Microsoft's product for something that 3com hasnt done? "writes the driver".

Negative, that's not the case. It has nothing to do with 3Com. The driver is actually included in XP (I think it's the same as the NT/2000 driver), it's just that the INF file doesn't exist to locate it. They deliberately excluded it because Microsoft is trying to wean us off of ISA cards.

OMG, that is so perfect. I'm now officially changing my nickname for XP from "AOL OS" to "Fischer-Price OS".

I always call it "Teletubbies OS".
From the first time I saw that landscape desktop I always thought that any minute one of those 4 puppets would appear on the screen. The likeness with the teletubbies mountain is simply stunning.

No it has nothing to do with the application - as I said, it's the USB driver that has problems.

We experienced similar issues with drivers for various products, and it wasn't our bug

Rob

I always call it "Teletubbies OS".

Oh, that's a good one, too.

ClearType works on any monitor. I like it a lot. It really does look better.

Calvin

That's odd. On Microsoft's ClearType info page, they don't even mention traditional anti-aliasing. Perhaps XP doesn't support ``font smoothing'' and jumps right over it to utilize ClearType. If that's the case, then ClearType would certainly look better than aliased fonts. But it wouldn't have any advantage on a CRT over normal anti-aliasing, unless anti-aliasing didn't exist.

I think Clear-Type only really works well on CRTs under certain circumstances... Like proper ordering of the color phosphors or a high quality grill/shadow mask/whatever.

It looks pretty good on certain Trinitron based monitors, but we have a few older monitors it looks horrible on. Either way, it really needs an LCD to show it's stuff.

I guess I'm biased, because it looks without a doubt better on my Trinitron and Cornerstone tube monitors.

Calvin

Hmmm.. I thought it was the 3c905b, not 509.....

I thought it was the 3c905b, not 509

I think it's got issues with both models if I recall correctly. But in my particular case, the big issue was with a system fitted with a 509, as I originally stated. That was not a typo, I really did mean 509.

Well, the Trinitron tubes make sense, since the phosphors on a Trinitron are laid out much like the LCDs are laid out on an LCD screen. That is, red, green, and blue sit next to each other horizontally, instead of in a triangle, like in shadow mask tubes.

However, I seriously doubt that Cornerstone makes tubes. In fact, they use both Trinitron and shadow mask tubes in their monitors, so, without knowing what model you're talking about, I can't comment on your experiences there.

So, does anyone know if XP has normal fonts, anti-aliased fonts, and ClearType fonts, or only normal and ClearType?

It has three settings for font-smoothing:

Off
Standard
ClearType

Does this BBS software do .png in the "image" tag? Check the attachment, anyway.

Give Peter's info, does ClearType look better than Standard on all of your monitors? Or are you just saying that anti-aliased fonts look better than aliased fonts?

The reason I ask is that my personal experience is that ClearType looks bad. I've not used XP's implementation, but I've used it somewhere (I want to say MacOS X, but I'm not sure of that) on a laptop LCD screen and had to turn it off almost immediately because it looked so bad -- and I tried different color ordering and everything. It just looked rainbow-y whereas the normal antialiasing looked fine and grey.

Does this BBS software do .png in the "image" tag?

It didn't used to in the past, but I was under the impression that Tom had hacked it so that it would work. Let's try it.

[image]http://empeg.comms.net/files/117003-xp_font_smoothing.png[/image]

Damn. TOM ??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In reply to:

---

The reason I ask is that my personal experience is that ClearType looks bad. I've not used XP's implementation, but I've used it somewhere (I want to say MacOS X, but I'm not sure of that) on a laptop LCD screen and had to turn it off almost immediately because it looked so bad -- and I tried different color ordering and everything. It just looked rainbow-y whereas the normal antialiasing looked fine and grey.

---

It will look rainbowy if you don't run the setup tool which I don't think they actually tell you about. If you have it set up "too much" it will look bad.

I had a 15" TFT I was planning on using the car which was sitting in my room for *months* - I then got the empeg and finally used the TFT on my computer. It (ClearType) makes using the computer *so* much easier that I couldn't believe it.

I will second the point by Rob that installing it as an upgrade is a bad idea, though it pained me to reinstall from scratch I don't regret doing it. Also, switch of "system restore" - waste of time unless you really live "on the edge"!

Gareth
PS. www.grc.com has a neat font smoothing demo.

Tom fixed PNG (again):

what's all this about 'remote desktop'?
what's it for?
how does it work?

It's like having PC-Anywhere built in to Windows.

Does this BBS software do .png in the "image" tag?

It didn't used to in the past, but I was under the impression that Tom had hacked it so that it would work. Let's try it.

Damn. TOM ??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sigh, people want their titles, and PNG images. I suppose I can swing bown