Fuzzy fonts

[spudmaster]

Hi, need help. All of a sudden my screen fonts have turned fuzzy. Not hugely so, but enough to make them a lot less than pin sharp. This is on a 24 inch Intel iMac, about 15 months old. If I boot and run the machine from an external firewire drive, the problem is fixed. But I want to use the machine as normal. This has nothing to do with the Universal Access system preference, and reinstalling the operating system from the system disks didn't help, either. It's driving me nuts. What has happened to my wonderfully crisp fonts? It doesn't matter what programme I use, the fonts all display slightly fatter and fuzzy. Yech!

All help most gratefully received, you techies out there!

Thanks

Spudmaster general.

 

[iBlue]

A long shot but in system preferences > appearance > "turn off text smoothing for fonts sized ___ and smaller" (make sure that is a small number 4 or 6 perhaps)

 

[spudmaster]

fuzzy fonts, text smoothing

Hi there, iBlue

Thanks for your comments, but unfortunately, already tried this to no avail. Just got darned fuzzy fonts. The easy way would be to install the system on my external hard drive, and just copy everything across to the iMac's inbuilt hard disk, but, this isn't as easy as it sounds ... all sorts of access privileges, and "items currently being used", etc, make this an uneasy option. Also, not everything I want to keep on the iMac's hard disk is included on the external drive ...yes, I'm a total failure!.... and finding out what's missing, but vital, could take forever.

Anyway, once again, thanks for your help.

 

[iBlue]

You do have to log out or restart to see the change but I take it you've already done that.

Are you running at native resolution?

Wish I had a better answer but I had to try the easiest one first.

 

[teleromeo]

you will need carbon copy cloner to make a working copy of the system on your external disk

 

[spudmaster]

fuzzy fonts

Hi teleromeo

Got carbon copy cloner, but being a stupido, haven't used it yet. However, will do so now, but I don't have problems starting up from the external firewire drive. When I do start up from that, all the fuzzies disappear, but I don't want to be consigned to having to always start up from my back-up disk ... seems to rather scamble the idea of a back-up disk. Also, back-up disk it might be, but it doesn't have everything on it ... mainly just the whole horde of files I use regularly, and that's millions!

If no savvy techie out there comes up with an answer, and I do appreciate all you guys posting possible solutions, I'll just have to set aside a huge chunk of time and rebuild the internal hard drive with everything on the external one, and in the process keep my fingers crossed that I don't delete or forget to copy across something that is absolutely vital. Not looking forward to that, though.

So any more ideas are more than welcome.

Thanks