RedHat 9 and Mac OSX both had a certain “beautiful” look to them. The fonts look really great. Windows was blah… Then one of the guys at work got a new laptop running XP which had beautiful looking fonts! I had to figure out how it did it… In the performance settings, both laptops had “Font Smoothing” enabled. Font on my laptop: Tahoma. Font on other laptop: Tahoma. Same fonts! So what could it be? After going through the XP display settings, I came across something called “Clear Type” in the methods section for font smoothing. After applying that, I’m a happy camper! Really makes XP beautiful - which makes life better when I have to use Windows…

Desktop -> Properties -> Appearance -> Effects…