Blurry Fonts in IE9 but not on my Laptop

[Perryg114]

I just upgraded my main office computer to Win7 and installed IE9. The fonts in IE9 look like they were drawn on a paper towel. I have a new Dell Laptop with Win 7 and IE9 and the fonts look fine on that. I just noticed also there is no cursor when you click it with a mouse in this window. The fonts on the desktop look fine in Firefox. I don't see much difference between Firefox and IE9 on the laptop.

Perry

[postmortemIA]

do you know what clear type is? is it not enabled for OS, but it is for IE9?

[Perryg114]

Yes I know what it is and I have turned it off in win 7 but IE9 has its own version that you can't turn off so I hear.

Perry

[evilspoons]

What kind of monitor do you have on your main office computer? Cleartype can look weird if it's not set up right. You may have a funny pixel arrangement on your LCD... and if you don't have an LCD, Cleartype just looks generally horrible.

[Perryg114]

I have a Westinghouse 1920x1200 LCD monitor that I have had for a few years. It looks fine in firefox. I have been through the setup for the clearview in windows and proceeded to turn it off. I don't understand why MS thinks that something that looks like a magic marker on a knapkin is a good thing. It does not look quite as bad on my secondary ASUS 1920x1080 LCD monitor. I don't see that it enhances anything under the best of circumstances so why would they force this on us.

Perry

[postmortemIA]

Looks like MS has article on this:
Fonts appear blurry in Internet Explorer 9
have you tried disabling hardware acceleration for IE (use software rendering option) ? that did make my fonts less blurry.

[Demo24]

Originally Posted by postmortemIA

Looks like MS has article on this:
Fonts appear blurry in Internet Explorer 9
have you tried disabling hardware acceleration for IE (use software rendering option) ? that did make my fonts less blurry.

Was going to recommend this, I had to do the same thing way back when ie9 came out.

[Perryg114]

Nothing seems to make this problem better. The older LCD monitors don't like Clear Type. My main monitor is old and it is fuzzy. My newer second monitor looks sharp. Both were clear with XP and IE8.

Perry

[Mushkins]

Important question, what kind of cable are you using for the monitor?

If you're using VGA (the blue one), it's pretty much guaranteed to be blurry. Switch it to DVI (the white one) or HDMI/DisplayPort if your monitor supports them and you'll see considerable gains in picture quality. WinXP tended to handle VGA a little better than Vista/7/8 because of the way it renders text (cleartype wasnt really a thing back then).

The laptop looks fine because the connector is most likely some sort of proprietary version of DVI for the internal monitor. You don't have the option of using the crappy connector