DX

I really don't know who at MS thought ClearType was a good idea, but personally I hate it. I want maximum clarity, contrast and sharpness on my desktop, so disabling ClearType is one of the first things to do when starting with a fresh Windows installation. For some strange reason you really need to dig deep to find the settings to do that. Here are the required steps, which I collected from various forums:

Disable ClearType:

• Control Panel -> Display -> Adjust ClearType text
• Uncheck "Turn on ClearType" and click through the adjustment wizard
• Finish

Disable font smoothing:

• Control Panel -> System -> Advanced system settings -> Advanced -> Performance -> Settings...
• Uncheck "Smooth edges of screen fonts"
• OK, OK

For a more Windows XP -look, you can change UI fonts:

• Control Panel -> Personalization -> Window Color (bottom row, second from left) -> Advanced appearance settings...
• Click through the items and change fonts to Tahoma
• OK, Save changes

Now you should have a crisp and sharp desktop without any blur whatsoever (unless your monitor sucks or is set to a non-native resolution). Some other programs (like PuTTY) uses Antialiasing too to blur things up, but that can be disabled as well: Windows -> Appearance -> Font quality: Default.

In short the keywords to avoid are: ClearType, Smoothing, Antialiasing