DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - MAY 2019
DARKER TEXT IN WINDOWS 10 USING WINAERO TWEAKER
©2019 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2019-07-06
Don's Freeware Corner notes are printed in the UTAH VALLEY
TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP (UVTAGG) Newsletter TAGGology
each month and are posted on his Class Notes Page https://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections and updates.
DARKER TEXT IN IN WINDOWS 10 USING WINAERO TWEAKER
WINDOWS 10
Us old codgers and codgerettes sometimes have a hard time
reading the text on our computer screens. It would be helpful
if Windows had a setting where you could just hold down some
key and roll the mouse wheel or press + and make all text
darker in all applications. The closest thing Windows claims
to have is changing the fonts to bold. There are instructions
of how to do that in the Windows 10 Helps and my family and I
spent hours trying to make that work. Finally, a son-in-law
found an article in a computer magazine that said that
Microsoft has disabled that in Windows 10, even though their
instructions tell you how to do it. They should at least put a
note at the top of their Helps article telling you to
disregard it, since it won't work. This Freeware Corner
article is about a work-around to make some of the text more
readable.
CHANGING THE FONTS BY CHANGING THE REGISTRY
If you know enough about working with the computer Registry in
Windows 10, there are ways to change the fonts there, but most
of us don't have the computer science qualifications to do
that and it is easy to foul up your computer by working in the
Registry and not knowing what you are doing. To solve this
problem a Russian program developer has written a freeware
program called WINAERO TWEAKER that allows you to change the
Registry without being an expert. Besides changing fonts, the
program provides ways to change more than 100 other things in
Windows 10.
WINAERO TWEAKER
This is a free program downloadable from https://winaero.com/ . Here
are two helpful articles about WINAERO TWEAKER,
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3152092/how-to-customize-your-windows-pc-with-winaero-tweaker.html
and
https://geekermag.com/winaero-tweaker/
.
You download the installation file and then install it.
Up until recently it was a zip file that had to be extracted
and then run. Now you install the download file, just like
other programs, and you can put icons on your desktop and/or
on your taskbar to run it. It has many, many Windows settings
changes, so you can run Windows 10 the way you want. The
changeable settings are listed in a scrolling window in
categories, as in the following screenshot.
the left panel shows the categories and as you highlight a
category, all possible changes in that category are shown in
the right panel. Most of the categories have several
subcategories and some have 30 or 40 subcategories. This
screenshot was made when the cursor was on Advanced Appearance
Settings, so the right panel shows the icons of the
subcategories of that. Each of these subcategories is
set up similarly. When you are looking at a subcategory, at
the top of its right panel is a box to check if you want to
reset that option to its Windows 10 default setting. Also near
the top is usually an option to go to the online WINAERO
TWEAKER website, where that option is described in detail, so
you know exactly what it will change. In most cases the option
is explained clearly enough in good English right in the
program for you to know what it does without going to the
website. When you click to change an option, boxes
appear at the bottom to ask if you want to restart Windows 10
now or wait and restart it manually later. Restarting is
necessary for the changes to take effect, so, if you are only
changing one item, click to restart now. But if you are
changing several options, you can save time by clicking to
restart manually later after you have made the other changes.
CHANGING FONTS
There is a search box at the top left, so I searched for
"font" (without the quotes) and got 3 occurrences, Message
Font, Statusbar Font, and System Font. These are each in
Advanced Appearance Settings. In each of these there are boxes
that show the current font and what words look like in that
font. As you select other fonts, you can see what the words
would look it in those fonts before you make the change. I've
found that the font Tahoma Bold and 11 point works well for my
poor eyesight. The options point out that this may not change
the text in every app since some can't be overridden because
of the the way they are written. When you click Apply Changes,
the Reboot Now or Later panel shows up. I made all three font
changes before rebooting. The three text places that I could
change are now easier for me to read, but, unfortunately,
there are many other places I need changed that t this doesn't
change, e.g. the text of instructions in my browsers.
But, being able to change some is better than none.
COMMENTS
It would be nice if Windows had a simple way to just reset all
text to be darker without changing the fonts. Or maybe that
could be built into monitors, so you could change the darkness
of all text. It seems like an easy problem to solve and would
be important for those of us with poor eyesight. This is next
best. By the way, one of my techie grandkids wrote me a
special program that makes some of the text in my Chrome
browser bold. He wrote it and sent me instructions to install
it, so it can be turned on or off. His program even makes the
text in my Gmails more readable and it is greatly appreciated.
Maybe he will write it as a Chrome extension so others can use
it.
CONCLUSIONS
WiINAERO TWEAKER is a freeware program with lots of good
options. It has so many options that I will be writing other
Freeware Corner articles about it. If any of you come across
other ways to make text darker, please let me know.
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