Hi everyone,

A short while back I was diagnosed with an eye disorder that will require laser surgery on both of my eyes in the near future which is pretty worrying.  All these years of working with computer monitors have finally taken their toll 😦 . I usually run my desktop pretty bright as I’m always working on my artwork but I have come up with a method that works pretty well and helps my eyes.

Firstly there’s the free Chrome browser extension called  Dark Reader this makes surfing web pages much more eye-friendly, you can also site list sites that you want darkened or left as normal although I haven’t found many sites that it doesn’t play nicely with. Also remember that if you work with Chrome browser, and possibly other browsers, that you can hold down the Ctrl key and use the middle mouse wheel to change the text size on a website.

Then I put  the Windows 10 UI into dark mode . Next up I bought Turn off the Lights Desktop from the Microsoft store. This Windows App dims the whole desktop and I’ve set it up to dim the display to 60% all day, you can set times if you wish or manually toggle the display dimming  from the tray icon. The app starts with Windows.

This left me with a problem as I run Dexpot virtual desktop software across multiple monitors and I have a couple of virtual desktops, specifically the one dedicated to my various graphics software, think of it as my “Art” mode desktop  🙂 . These virtual desktop I do not want dimmed so I used Dexpot’s Desktop Rules feature to copy Turn Off the Lights (running on my “Default” virtual desktop) to only the virtual desktops that I want dimmed and thus when switching to my “Art” desktop it automatically displays at my normal un-dimmed brightness. Dexpot is a very powerful and fully featured free program.

Hope this is of interest and take good care of your eyes. Contact me if you are require any assistance in setting any of these programs up.

Kind regards

PS. I forgot to mention another very useful program that’s better than Windows dark mode called Windows Blinds (30 day trial available) which is much better at customising Windows UI colours. I downloaded a free add-on theme/style called Dark Mode and customised it to my tastes.

PPS. I found a program to restore the system font changing that was removed in the Windows 10 Creators update, much to my annoyance, and I’ve changed my font from 9 point normal to 10 point bold throughout, you’d be surprised how much of a difference this makes.

https://www.wintools.info/index.php/system-font-size-changer

I also found another nice style/theme for WindowBlinds, it’s not a dark theme but it seems to be quite comfortable on the eye and one can customise it in WindowBlinds 10 –

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/search/nvidia+xp