But I have to admit, the outlandish new “Characters” and “Scenes” themes have had me grinning like a Cheshire Cat. I never thought I’d say this, but this new edition of Windows really is beautiful.

And though it looks great out of the box, there’s one quick tweak I can recommend to make it look even better.

Calibrating your display

Many graphics drivers come with tools to let you adjust the curve between dark and light shades (known as gamma) to suit your monitor. In principle, it’s nothing new: but what is new in Windows 7 is a standard built-in calibrator that makes it all but effortless to get the best from your screen.

The control is hidden away in a sub-pane of the Display settings, but you can jump to it instantly by simply hitting the start button and typing “calibrate”: the first option will be “Calibrate display colour”.

Launch it and it’ll walk you through a few introductory pages, then give you a slider to to adjust your gamma. All you need to do is move the slider up or down until the grey dots in the test image are, as closely as possible, the same shade as the circles surrounding them.

On almost every system I’ve calibrated, the default setting has been too high, resulting in a washed-out display. Pulling the slider downward gives greater weight to dark items (such as text) while bringing out detail in bright areas and adding vibrancy to colours. It’s like a free monitor upgrade.

For your eyes only

Of course, the advantages of this adjustment are subjective and limited to your own PC: colours probably won’t print out exactly as they appear on your screen, and when you share photographs with others you may find that what looks great for you appears overexposed on a different display. But that’s always been a problem: now at least what you personally see should reflect the best your hardware is capable of.

The calibration tool also helps you set the brightness and contrast controls on your monitor, and lets you adjust the overall colour balance, to compensate for any slight colour cast in your display. It can also launch the ClearType tuner to make text as readable as possible.

But while those are worthwhile adjustments, but none of them is likely to have as dramatic an effect as simply dragging that slider a little way down its scale.

LG’s newest 22in TFT, the W2252TE, is a case in point. Heralded in its press release as “the world’s most energy efficient monitor”, it claims to offer “a 45% reduction (40W) in power consumption, leading the way in environmentally friendly computer screens”.

Inevitably, the question arises: a 45% reduction over what? No comparison is offered, no rival energy-efficient monitor or even the name of a standard monitor against which the LG may have been tested. The 45% reduction could be over the most power-hungry monitor in the world for all we know. And what does that 40W figure in parentheses represent? The power consumption of this monitor? Of the comparison monitor? Or is 40W the reduction itself?

Scrolling to the specs buried right at the bottom of the release we learn that the power consumption of the W2252TE is in fact 22W – surely a more headline-grabbing figure than the “45% energy reduction” that again follows it. So we know the 40W figure must be the monitor to which LG is comparing the W2252TE, but again we’re given no clue as to what monitor this could be. Another LG monitor? A rival manufacturer? Same size or larger? The figures are meaningless without this information.

It’s nothing new to us. Graphics card manufacturers are constantly slapping “world’s fastest” labels onto their latest creations based on individual game benchmarks, while Intel and AMD can both boast the fastest CPUs depending on what applications and tests you quote. And the fact that very few consmuers have the means, or indeed the desire, to test any of these claims for themselves just makes it easier for the big companies to prove anything they like with “facts”.

Taken on good faith the claims about LG’s W2252TE make for good reading, and the company should be applauded for investing in making its products greener. But if manufacturers want their advances to receive the recognition they deserve, a little more information would go an awful long way.

Essentially, it’s a screen for a projector, albeit one that wraps the image around you, immersing the eager gamer in a 180 degree world. The possibilities, surely, are endless: tramping through the lush jungles of Crysis will be even more immersive, and you really can be a Supreme Commander if the battlefield is stretched around you. World in Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3, Tabula Rasa: all will benefit.

Imagine, if you will, Football Manager: statistics as far as the eye can see, and the 2D match engine will surely look revolutionary when you’re surrounded by it.

The uses, then, are endless, and I’m sure that the adult film industry is already working on a way to exploit the new technology. The best thing about it, though, is the price. Surely a piece of kit like this will cost thousands? Maybe not – depending on funding being sought, the creator aims to sell the jDome for between $125 and $200. A totally immersive, semi-circular screen for little more than a couple of games? Count me in.