How can I make the text in Windows bigger?

I don't know if I'm just getting old or what, but the text in my version of Microsoft Windows is tiny and I want to make it bigger. You know, the labels underneath icons, the text in dialog boxes, etc. I know there's a way to do that: how do I make the text in my Windows theme larger or bigger?

Dave's Answer:

You're probably not just getting older, don't worry. If you have a new computer, it's quite possible that you have it set to a higher screen resolution than your old computer, which lets you see more on the screen at once, a good thing, but also means that everything is smaller because if it's sized based on a specific number of pixels (screen dots) it also is going to take up less physical space on the screen for the same, say, 40 pixels of width.

One way you can fix things is to change your screen resolution, but if you have a screen that can display 1200 pixels across with great clarity, it'd be sub-optimal to tweak it so that you're running at 800x600 so that things were bigger because you'd just be losing out on the capabilities of your Windows PC display.

Instead there are indeed some easy settings you can get to in Windows 7, for example, that let you tweak the size of the text used in all the standard Windows display elements. This feature is also available in Windows XP and Windows Vista, and it's generally all found in the same place...

Go to Start --> Control Panels and look for the "Display" option:

Once you're there, it couldn't be much easier to learn how to set the size of the type on your display screen:

Under the helpful headline "Make it easier to read what's on your screen" you can choose "Smaller" (which is 100% or standard size), "Medium" (which is 125% normal) and "Larger" (which is 150% normal). Try the middle choice and see how it goes. If that doesn't help, go to Larger and see how things work out for you.

Also check out:

Categorized: Windows PC Help (Article 9943, Written by Dave Taylor)
Tagged: customization, larger text size, personalization, text size, win7, windows 7
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