How to Improve Windows Experience With Ultra-High Resolution Displays
Ultra-high-definition displays are becoming more common on Windows laptops, but the dense packing of pixels on a small screen comes with some trade-offs. The resulting image can be great – text looks smooth, and high quality images look amazing – but not all applications are designed to work in high resolution, which creates a very ambiguous experience.
You may have heard people refer to these types of displays as “retina”. Apple popularized the term when describing displays with such high resolution that you cannot distinguish between individual pixels because they are very densely packed – they literally have a high number of dots per inch (DPI). The most common high DPI. The displays available are called QHD +. These screens have a resolution of 3200×1800 – more than Full HD (1920×1080), but not quite 4k (4096 x 2160). This is great for new software with high resolution icons, but problems arise when older software is not designed for these high resolution displays. Having densely packed pixels on a small screen means these apps will appear tiny and illegible without a magnifying glass:
This could be great on a 30 “monitor, but the above screenshot was taken on my 13” laptop.
To combat this, Windows can “scale” programs and text to make them more usable. Even running 1920×1080 on a small screen will probably need some scaling, and when you run QHD + on a small 13-inch display, scaling is an absolute must. Luckily, Windows can do this for you, but it might take some tweaking to get exactly what you want.
Upgrade to Windows 8.1 already
For starters, you should really upgrade your system to Windows 8.1 if you haven’t already. 8.1 adds improved support for high-resolution displays and intelligently select the resolution and scaling option based on the size and resolution of your display. Older operating systems were not designed with these absurdly high DPI values in mind, and they offer less room for expanding and scaling their interfaces. As much as you love your old OS ( I’m looking at you Windows 7 lovers ), you may have to be reluctant to dive into the present if you want to make full use of your display. (Or you can wait for Windows 10 to be available as a free update very soon.)
Adjust system-wide scaling to scale up everything
With Windows 8.1, you have the ability to scale everything across your entire system. This means that any user interface can be magnified in a specific ratio, including icons, menus, and other visual aspects of the software. Things like the scrollbar and X button will be as big or small as you want, in addition to all the text in the application.
To control system-wide scaling, right-click on the desktop background and select a screen resolution, then go to Make Text and Other Elements Larger or Smaller.
Windows has already picked what it thinks is the best setting for your screen, but you can try different scaling options to find the best balance between screen real estate and usability. Sometimes I zoom out when I want multiple windows to be open, but I definitely need to squint to see everything. By default, Windows provides a slider with several resizing options. To control the exact percentage of scaling, click Let Me Choose One Zoom Level For All My Displays and then Custom Size Options.
You also have the option to adjust the text size independently of other UI elements. This can be useful if your only real concern is text legibility, but there are really only a few text elements that you can customize (like headers, menus, icons, and a few others), and large text with small interface borders. … looks awkward and unbalanced.
Fix stupid programs that don’t scale well
System-wide scaling on Windows works well for some programs, but others – like older programs or programs that simply don’t follow the Windows design patterns – won’t scale well. You may find that these programs (like Steam) will have fuzzy text or blurry graphics that just look like crap.
You can, however, say Windows is not at the scale of these programs. For this:
- Right-click the program icon and select Properties. (If it’s pinned to the taskbar, right-click the program name again.)
- On the Compatibility tab, select the Disable display scaling at high resolution settings check box. Your application will now run without any scaling effect, regardless of system-wide settings.
Of course, now you have a new problem: without scaling, many of these programs will seem so small that they are difficult to use. However, depending on the program, this can be fixed. Some applications offer manual scaling capabilities to customize specific interfaces (often controlled by pressing Ctrl + and Ctrl-). Check out their menus for scaling options to make things a little bigger.
If the program offers custom skins, you can also try looking for a skin with large buttons. For example: PotPlayer , our favorite video player , doesn’t scale very well, but allows you to create your own skins. If you manage to find a skin with large buttons like this Metro style (shown above), you can use it to make the program clear and easy to use.
There may be one or two programs that simply cannot be fixed, and you will have to decide if you want to deal with a useful blurry application or a pretty tiny application. Hopefully more developers will fix their applications as high density displays become more popular.
Metro apps are your friends (seriously)
Windows 8 has annoyed many long-time users by prioritizing touch-based, full-screen Metro apps (now called “modern” apps, or simply Windows 8 apps) over the traditional desktop. But these Windows 8 apps are usually designed with new displays in mind, not to mention the large touch buttons. This means that they work well with high-resolution screens and, depending on the application you are trying to use, may offer a better solution than their desktop counterparts.
For example, I can’t get VLC to scale well on my system, but VLC for Windows 8 offers a very good interface, is fast, responsive, and looks great on my QHD + display. There are many native Windows 8 apps like Adobe Reader Touch or Skype that aren’t often talked about, but they are great replacements for their desktop versions. (Note: Skype for Windows 8 will unfortunately be discontinued soon).
And, if you don’t want to launch these apps in full screen mode, you can use Stardock’s ModernMix to launch them as separate windows on your desktop . Windows 10 will also have this capability built in when it releases next month.
Refuse for what? The convenience of use.
When all else fails, you can simply lower the screen resolution to make poorly scaled apps more usable. Downgrading from 3200×1800 to 1920×1080 will still look pretty sharp on a 15-inch screen without any flawed apps. You won’t have the same retina, but older software will be more usable. (And hopefully you can go back to 1800 when more developers join high-resolution displays.)
Of course, this is easy to do: just adjust the screen resolution in the display settings.
- Right click on your desktop and select your screen resolution.
- Select the resolution you want from the drop-down list – you need to experiment a little. Try to keep the same aspect ratio of your resolution (most likely 16×9).
I’m using an old version of Photoshop that doesn’t scale at all, so the tiny icons are mostly illegible when working at their original resolution. Since the software is outdated – and it’s too cheap to update – it works so much better when I just lower the screen resolution.