Hi Dave. I’m running Windows 8 and it’s a constant headache. Literally. Everything on screen, all the icons, the text in folder listings, everything’s just too darn small on my screen. Is there some way to make all the icons, labels, and other stuff bigger?
There are a lot of different factors that come into play when Microsoft Windows 8 is figuring out how large to make things on your screen, one of the most important of which is simply screen resolution. I may be a heretic for saying this, but if you have a big screen, you really don’t need to run it at super high resolution. Simply lowering you screen resolution from, say 1920 pixels across to 1200 will automatically make everything bigger, including even the windows and dialog boxes in individual apps as they scale to fit.
That can be aggravating, however, if you want to have, say, high resolution maps or better resolution photos or videos and really just seek bigger icons and text within the Desktop itself.
Fortunately, Windows has always had excellent support for this sort of tweak (not to mention a ton of options for people with various motor skill or visual impairments) and in Windows 8, like Windows 7, it’s really just a few clicks away from the frustrating tiny view you currently have on your Desktop.
Let’s have a look!
Simply right-click on the Desktop (not the Start Screen, the Desktop itself) and a context menu pops up:
Choose “Screen resolution”, as shown, and you’ll be shown a pretty complicated window:
Almost there. See near the bottom the blue text “Make text and other items larger or smaller”? Click on it (unless you want to monkey with your screen resolution and see how that works. You can see mine is set to “1920×1200).
I’ll assume you want to change icons, etc, so click on the link and let’s see what our options are:
Here’s a tip for you: Instead of fiddling with the slider, simply cilck on the checkbox adjacent to “Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays”. Makes it a lot easier to fine tune the results:
Pick the option you’d like, then click on the “Apply” button on the lower right. It doesn’t instantly happen (alas) but requires that you log out and log in again:
No worries. Click “Sign out now” (if you’re ready) and sign in again. Poof! Your icons, your text on screen, everything’s bigger and you haven’t lost any resolution when you watch videos, play games, etc.
Done deal. There are more advanced options for fine tuning your resolution, by the way, but this is the easiest way to make it more easily visible for your eyes.