I don’t know what my daughter did to my PC but all my desktop icons and files are tiny now! How do I make them bigger again?
Ah yes, another reason to set up user accounts on your computer, whether you’re running Windows XP (you;re not, I hope), Windows 8, or the latest, Windows 10. Turns out it’s easy to do and then if someone messes up the settings, preferences, or goes on a file deletion rampage, all of your files, programs and settings are still safe. Here’s one solution I wrote about a few months ago, setting up simple local user-only accounts in Windows 10.
This doesn’t help your problem today, however, so let’s have a look at how to change the size of the file and folder icons on your Windows desktop and fix it all up! Worth knowing is that there are three sizes of icons you can chose from, small, medium and, well, large, and I’ll show all three.
To start, here’s a typical assortment of icons on Win10.1:
As with much in Windows, a right click is the gateway to fixing the problem. In this case, a right click on a blank area of the screen that has no icons, folders, or anything else will bring up the Desktop context menu:
As you can see, “View” gives you the options of small, medium or large icons. Let’s jump straight to Large icons here on Win10 and see the difference:
They’re quite a big larger. In fact, kind of too large. Let’s try Medium icons instead, sort of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears beds, right?
That’s better.
Note: It’s hard to convey the size differences here so try all three settings on your computer to see which works best for you!
Now that everything’s a good size again, have a quick peek at the Sort By menu option too (remember: right-click on a blank area to get the menu to show up):
Be careful before you change this setting, however, as you can’t undo the sort-by and icons zip all over the screen as it organizes things! Can be a bit disconcerting.
Anyway, that should get you back to your preferred Windows 10 Desktop icon sizes and configuration. Now, about your daughter changing your settings… 🙂
I think that this can also happen with bigger resolutions. The bigger your screen resolution, the smaller the icons and the UI in general.