Display settings changed to enhance performance - crude basic text

Hi there

New to this and clueless so sorry in advance! I have a Sony Vaio laptop running windows 10, about 5 years old. It started to lag a lot so I looked up some ways to enhance performance. Read a few articles online and followed a few steps to speed up my laptop. I cleared out a lot of unnecessary programs and changed some display settings. This all resulted in better performance, but the text on my screen to be reset to crude, basic text. (screenshot attached) I now have a suspicion that this is bad for my eyes and I'm about to start an online course, so I want to change the settings back. Unfortunately, I can't remember exactly what I did.
Here's what my screen looks like

I know that I definitely unchecked this: Automatically manage paging file size for all drives
(read it in an article and followed the steps exactly) and manually calculated paging file size for all drives. Would this have anything to do with my text problem?

Any suggestions of what happened and how to fix it would be great.
I'm also wondering if I change the settings back, if my laptop will return to it's previous slow speed, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Hi, I tried your first suggestion and no improvement.

Here you go

@ainekav

'Smooth edges of screen fonts' is where the lousy text comes into play, check out your Visual Effects settings:

Edwin said:

@ainekav

'Smooth edges of screen fonts' is where the lousy text comes into play, check out your Visual Effects settings:

bingo!!! Thanks a million - that's sorted.

That's exactly what I was going to suggest you needed to do and on my PC I only have 3 things checked on the Custom tab and mine runs great and looks great without all the other stuff checked that you don't need.

Here are the ones I have checked...........

Both of the "Smooth" ones near the bottom
And the only other one is the "Show thumbnails instead of icons"

You have not sorted those columns in the Task Manager in such a manner for usage like CPU usage, or Disk usage so we cannot see much of what is going on.

I would suggest you scan the Hard drive as it's getting quite old.

See to the settings of AVG.
Maybe you like AVG, however I would uninstall that and use Windows Defender for a while. For analysis purposes.

Check the temperatures of the CPU and the fan speed. I use HWMonitor from CPUID.

The Performance Options are a bit of a red herring, some of those effects make Windows look slow, does not mean it actually is. Fading/Sliding menus etc are an example of that.