Alas, my Windows 10 desktop icon font is furry !

A quick goodle suggests "desktop icon labels drop shadow" is a known problem with Windows 10, Task View, and some advanced options.

It's designed to make text more readable when superimposed over "busy" photographic backgrounds as many desktop "wallpapers" are. With a plain backdrop however some find it can make text less intelligible - especially if the monitor is not very sharp.

Do you have a recent 'smart' TV that is full HD ?. If this PC has an HDMI output, try connecting it to your TV and see if is any better.

You can get a 22 inch 1920*1080 monitor for £100 or so but oddly if you really need an 18 to 20 inch monitor of the older 4x3 size they are now much more expensive than a 22 inch one.

There seems to be a bias towards driving customers to higher and higher DPI monitors, to compensate for the mush around text. At one time, they used ClearType alone for font antialiasing, which involves coloured pixels. Then they switched to a grayscale method. And for some of these, they added drop shadows.

In the comparison, the Insider Edition of Windows 11 seems to have switched back to a vanilla text. Perhaps this is related to my plain colour background choice, in place of the wild window symbol by default.

Furry pictures, in theory, can happen because the screen is not protected by HDCP (link encryption) and the screen resolution is higher than 1920x1080 or so. Windows will blur the screen on purpose, as a means to protect "Hollywood content". Even the video card, has a protected area for decoded video content, to prevent "stealing" frame buffer level information with Hollywood movie frames inside it.

You can use Start : Run : snippingtool to be able to capture screenshots.

Then, using an image editor, you can blow up the captured and saved images, to do your pixel level comparisons.

A good version of snippingtool, has a "delay" parameter that can be set, so that you can also capture menu text. Win7 has no delay value in its interface. Win10 has a delay value available in SnippingTool. Windows 11, the interface is a mess again, a testament to a lack of ideas. Putting the save button on the top right, as if we were torturing Linux users for a living.

The GIMP image editor, also has screen capture via "Create" menu item, complete with delay. However, like most modern software, it strives to make the user interface, as awful as possible, which means I rely on version 2.4.7 for any practical usage. If I'm on Windows 7, and the SnippingTool doesn't have a Delay value, I switch to GIMP and capture the screen with it.

The reason the default Windows screen font is carefully controlled, is so that dialog boxes render within their boundaries, and no text gets chopped off by accident. Changing the screen scale factor to 125%, can affect this rendering and the dialog boxes are not auto-resizing to fix it either.

Approximately 2% of the audience, "cannot stand" what Windows does to fonts, in terms of antialiasing. Some users have a "zebra gene", which means certain feathering touches that other people ignore, drive those people to distraction. If you've ever seen a discussion thread where those people show up, they can be quite vocal.

Paul

In at least one encoding of colour - such as, maybe, 8-bit RGB in a 32-bit integer - there is an extra colour "Transparent". ISTM that there could be another, "Opposite", for which each of the RGB values was replaced by "V := (V + halfFullScale) mod FullScale" or maybe by using bitwise XOR ... .

For Andre - I have no TV at all here, and no space for any but a small display by the PC, which is in a bedroom.. The monitor is 17", near-square. All components of the system are pre-used.