How to Make a Monitor More Usable

Is your computer monitor giving you headaches, hurting your eyes and difficult to read, making it practically unusable? Have you ever wondered if there is something you can do to make your monitor more usable? Well, there is. These simple steps can help soothe your aching head, rest your weary eyes and make your computer monitor a pleasure to use.

Instructions

1. Turn your brightness knob down. You don't want the whites on your screen to be as bright as possible, instead you want the blacks to be as black as possible. The brighter your screen the more radiation is hitting your eyes, so when you reduce the radiation, you are able to see the black and white text with more ease.

2. Increase the refresh rate. If you are willing to sacrifice a bit of resolution and color depth, you will ease the stress on your eyes. Try to set the refresh rate to 85 Hz or more.

3. Place your monitor in a semi-dark location to reduce glare on the screen. Direct sunlight especially reduces contrast and makes it difficult to read the monitor. The best place is in front of a window, so that when you are sitting at your desk you are facing the window, with the back of the computer monitor to the window. That way you don't have to sacrifice sunlight to have a more usable monitor.

4. Configure your backgrounds to darker colors, like navy or black with contrasting bright colored text, as it makes your screen easier to read.

5. Set your resolution a bit higher. This may be the most important step to making your monitor more usable. Increase the screen resolution as high as possible while still being able to read the text. This will increase screen space and make your experience more pleasurable.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep your monitor clean. A dingy and smudged computer screen is difficult to read.