As a quick followup to this article (how to workaround the bug in Microsoft Office 2007 that breaks your fonts in Windows), I had to show someone today what I meant when I said that their laptop was set to “blurry” mode, and realised there was a quick way of testing it.
If you can’t be bothered to try it, here’s two screenshots that demonstrate precisely why I hate blurry fonts on any good-quality LCD:
The image on the left is Windows in “blurry” mode (with forced anti-aliasing of all system fonts). The image on the right is the exact same system, just with blurring turned off. Note that the way Windows renders fonts, the title bar of the two windows looks significantly different. This is really annoying, because the left hand title IMHO looks much nicer – but that same effect isn’t applied to the rest of the window, including the menu bar, which looks awful.