Re: My entire monitor display shrunk to half its size

Changing the resolution won't change the size of anything unless the display is "stretching" a lower resolution to fill the screen.

Say that your physical screen is 1024x768 (XGA, a common resolution); before, your desktop was, say, 640x480, and icons might have been 64x64 [pixels]. 640x480 is less (a lot less) than 1024x768, so what you get is a 640x480 desktop centered within a physical 1024x768 screen, and a big black border taking up the rest of the screen. [Some desktop LCD monitors will "stretch" the 640x480 desktop to fill the screen; most laptops won't, and in my opinion [but this is subjective] not stretching them is better.]

When you changed the desktop to 1024x768, that gave you more desktop on which to place icons (and in doing so it filled the screen with active live desktop, end of black border), but the size of the icons themselves hasn't changed ... they are still (for example) 64x64, and exactly the same size as they were (although you could now get a lot more of them on the desktop). The same goes for text.

If they are smaller now than they were before any of this started, then a lot more changed than the resolution, but it's not clear how, where or why. Things that could have changed include font sizes, icon sizes, the global Windows display DPI setting and the "theme" used by Windows (if any). All of these can be changed, but the chances of finding the exact combination of all of the settings that you had before are not good.

The 3 particular settings that you might want to look at first are:

-Small vs. Large Icons
-Small vs. Large fonts
-The global DPI setting

Icon size is set under display properties / appearance / effects

Font size and global DPI scaling is under display properties / Settings / Advanced

Themes, which change all of these and more all at once, are under display properties / themes.


dewey wrote:
Thanks Barry, I readjusted the resolution but when I did it all of the
icons remained at half-size along with the fonts of websites, folders,
etc. Any idea how to get the proportions back to normal?

.

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