Ed Bott - Windows 10 Support Secrets

78 CHAPTER 6 | Taking charge of hardware In Windows 10, you can check the current settings for your display by going to Settings > System > Display. (Even faster: Point to any empty space on the desktop, right-click, and then click Display Settings from the shortcut menu.) For laptops and desktop PCs with a single screen, the Display Settings page looks something like the one in Figure 6-1. In fact, you can tell from two settings on this page that it belongs to a laptop PC. See if you can spot the telltale signs. Figure 6-1: The rotation and brightness settings are found only on laptop and tablet displays. Note that Scaling is set to 200% on this device, which has an extremely high resolution for its size. In Figure 6-1, Lock Rotation Of This Display is set to On. That switch is also dimmed and can’t be changed. That’s because these settings are found on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4, a hybrid device that has a detachable keyboard. In this example, because the keyboard is attached, Windows 10 treats it like a laptop and removes the ability to rotate the display. If you detach the keyboard and use the device as a tablet, that switch is available again. Brightness is the other setting on that page that’s common to laptops, which typically have a sensor that can make the laptop display brighter or dimmer to compensate for ambient light. The brighter the display, the more battery it uses. To control brightness manually, turn off the Change Brightness Automatically When Lighting Changes setting and then move the slider to your preferred level. (Even faster: Skip this Settings page and use the Brightness button in Action Center, which cycles through various preset brightness levels with each tap.) One setting you won’t see on that page is display resolution. Windows 10 sets that value automatically, using the native resolution of the attached display. To see the current resolution and adjust it, click Advanced Display Settings. That opens a page like the one shown in Figure 6-2.