Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

chapter 13: system preferences 363

Tip: You can find dozens more screen saver modules at www.epicware.com/macosxsavers.html.

Displays

Displays is the center of operations for all your monitor settings. Here, you set your

monitor’s resolution, determine how many colors are displayed onscreen, and calibrate

color balance and brightness.

Tip: On a laptop, you can open up this panel with a quick keystroke from anywhere on the Mac. Just press

Option as you tap one of the screen-brightness keys (F1 or F2) on the top row of your keyboard.

The specific controls you’ll see here depend on the kind of monitor you’re using, but

here are the ones you’ll most likely see.

Display Tab

This tab is the main headquarters for your screen controls. It governs these settings:

• Resolutions. All Mac screens can make the screen picture larger or smaller, thus

accommodating different kinds of work. You perform this magnification or reduc-

tion by switching among different resolutions (measurements of the number of

dots that compose the screen). The Resolutions list displays the various resolution

settings your monitor can accommodate: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, and so on (Figure

13-9).

Figure 13-9:

In the early days of

computing, higher

color settings entailed

a speed hit, since it

took time to compute

the color for thou-

sands of individual

pixels. Today, there’s

little downside to

leaving your screen

at its maximum ...