No matter what Microsoft ends up doing or not doing with Windows LonghornVista, the biggest change people will notice when they boot Redmond’s new operating system will be the clarity of the fonts. Why? Because for the first time since the technology debuted back in the Windows 2000 days, Windows will ship with ClearType ON by default.

I had not realized how much of a big deal this is until I noticed that many of my colleagues at work and many of the machines in the labs that we administer have it off. The next time I installed XP on my own machine, I looked, and in fact it is off by default!

So please, everyone, take a deep breath and open your Display Control Panel, go into the Appearance tab and the Effects button, and where it says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts,” make sure it says “ClearType.” Then, if you really want to have it look great to you, go to Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner with Internet Explorer (it does not work in Firefox as it is ActiveX-based).

There, now doesn’t this post look so much better?