2007/10/02

Pixelated windows graphics fix

I had a new laptop, XP Pro SP2, IE6. Graphics in IE and in the start menu and taskbar were blocky, pixelated.

The problem was, Dell knew the display was hi-res and small, so they set a registry setting for me to automatically dumb-down the graphics, to make them more legible.

This made web pages render incorrectly, and it made the screen icons look bad. Change this key to fix it.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
change
"UseHR"=dword:00000000

Who says only Linux has silly things like this, or that Windows is more user-friendly? My grandma would never have found this fix.