The Appearancetab allows users to customize the appearance of
Windows including colors, effects (such as fading or scrolling type
in or out), point size, and font style.
Of great importance is the Settingstab, where you can choose the
screen resolution. (A modern laptop can usually pack as much as
1280 ×800 pixels or 1400×1050 and even more.) The trick is to get as
much resolution and as much information onscreen as you can see and
use; there’s no point to using a resolution that results in images, icons,
and type too small to see. You can also choose the color quality,the
number of colors used by the adapter in creating images; the highest
setting on most laptops is 32 bits. High resolution and high color set-
tings are both dependent on sufficient video memory.DVD/CD-ROM drives.Most current laptops include a CD or CD-R and
many feature a combination drive that will also read data from a DVD
and show videos. You can check the properties of the hardware and
make changes or adjustments to the device driver.Controllers
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllersreport on the hard disk drive controller, with both
hardware and device driver tabs. IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers are the com-
ponent of the motherboard in charge of managing FireWire input and output,
using the IEEE 1394 specification.A laptop’s built-in keyboardis monitored here. If you add a second external
keyboard, it may be assigned to this category or managed by the USB con-
troller. A laptop’s built-in pointing device— which can be a touch pad, a
pointing stick, or a tiny trackball — is monitored here. If you add a second
external pointing device it may be assigned to this category or managed by
the USB controller.An internal modembuilt into the motherboard, attached to it on a tiny daugh-
terboard, or (in some designs) attached to the laptop through the serial or
USB port is managed here. A fourth design, one in increasing use especially as
dial-up modems become less common because of the growth of wireless and
wired broadband connections, is a software modem which uses the facilities
of the computer’s microprocessor and its memory to emulate the hardware of
a modem when needed.The laptop’s display adapter considers the built-in LCD as a monitorand usu-
ally will also work with an external standard video display. Some machines
can operate both at the same time, and others can also send an image to a
standard television set.Adapters
A state-of-the-art laptop may include several network adapters, including a
standard wired NIC (network interface card), a 1394 (FireWire) network
adapter, and a wireless network adapter. The PCMCIA adapters section of the72 Part II: Explaining What Could Possibly Go Wrong