Appearances really can be deceptive

If you have to squint to read this it's my fault and I'm very sorry. I've been playing with my PC's settings and the screen is now set to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels. It's great, I've got lots of stuff on my monitor - only now it's so small that I can't even read it.

Hold on.

I'm back. I just popped into the appearance part of desktop properties and changed the size of the fonts on the tool bar.

Unfortunately, while I was there, I also changed the colour of the active title bar to a particularly viciously horrible shade of purple - it looks terrible.

I really must get down to writing this column. I will find something to write about soon, honest. By the way the mouse pointer is now blue and doesn't look much like a mouse pointer at all.

It's getting worse, somehow I have introduced a load of sound effects to Windows and every time I click on a menu my machine makes a swooshing noise, and it's now getting very, very irritating.

And because I have played with the icon spacing, all the icons on my desktop are too close together - it's going to take a long time to sort that out.

But I will get around to writing this column as soon as I have finished.

I promise, you'll just have to bear with me.

I discovered that you can change the typeface on the icons, but then less than a mere five minutes later I'm bored with the new typeface and want to change it back. Only I don't know what it was before I changed it.

That's torn it, I have set Windows to high contrast one - extra large - and I am now writing in yellow on a black background with everything else on the desktop (and in the application) too large to fit on the screen.

This isn't going too well at all.

It's now about half a day since I sat down to write this column, but ended up playing with the look of Windows. I promise I'll finish soon.

I know it's in the nature of writers to displace when they are trying to work, but I really wonder if Microsoft designed Windows to be quite so helpful to us. Does the $500bn Microsoft really think that we need that much flexibility for our desktop? What good does it serve to be able to make the fonts on your screen unreadable? And why give us the opportunity to make all the colours on the screen the same (yes it's possible - I've just spent 10 minutes doing it)? Just how many hours have been wasted playing around with the look of Windows?

It's times like this that I miss good old Dos. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't such a good idea to give punters infinite control over their environments.

Maybe having someone tell you what colours you can and can't use is a good idea.

Maybe I will go back to a typewriter - at least I can see where I'm supposed to write. I wonder if I can change the font in my word processor to a typewriter font, now what would that be called?