Page 299 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Orientation

Depending on your monitor, you may see an Orientation drop-down menu
on the Display settings screen. Believe it or not, this control lets you flip
your screen image upside down or into a mirror image. These options make

hilarious practical jokes, of course, but they were actually designed to
accommodate newfangled PC designs where, for example, the screen half
of a laptop flips over, A-frame style, so people across the table from you

can see it.

In any case, once you choose an orientation and click Apply or OK, a
dialog box lets you either keep or discard the setting. Which is lucky,

because if the image is upside down on a regular PC, it’s really hard to get
any work done.

If you’re running Windows 10 on a tablet, you may also see a “Rotation

lock” on/off switch. When rotation lock is turned on, the screen no longer
rotates when you turn the tablet 90 degrees. The idea is that sometimes, like
when you’re reading an ebook on your side in bed, you don’t want the

screen picture to turn; you want it to stay upright relative to your eyes.

Colors

Today’s video cards offer different color depth settings, each of which

permits the screen to display a different number of colors simultaneously.
You usually have a choice between settings like Medium (16-bit), which
was called High Color in early versions of Windows; High (24-bit), once

known as True Color; and Highest (32-bit).

In the early days of computing, higher color settings required a sacrifice in
speed. Today, however, there’s very little downside to leaving your screen

at its highest setting. Photos in particular look best when you set your
monitor to higher-quality settings.

To check your settings, right-click the desktop. From the shortcut menu,

choose “Display settings.” On the Settings screen, click “Advanced display
settings” and then “Display adapter properties” to open the Properties