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Make icons in 'Show hidden icons' LARGE ?

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Curt:
64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

Aging eyes, lack of light, etcetera and whatever, I cannot see the icons very well when I click the up-arrow on the Taskbar > 'Show hidden icons'; they are simply too small. I have searched for a manual here and there and everywhere, well obviously I still miss searching the right place, but surely there must be a way to make also this feature display LARGE icons, please?!
 :tellme:





IainB:
Some possible alternatives for adjusting the visual ergonomics in Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium:
1. Change sizes of your display items all together: via Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display. You might not like this, but it's probably worth a suck it and see approach.

2. Tweak the individual items using this approach: Customize the Title Bar and Other System Fonts in Windows 7. I used this and after a lot of fiddling about was able to get my display just how I wanted it, though I left the small Systray notification icons as they were. Can be quite confusing and tedious, but it is rewarding if it enables you to get things just so. Once you set it all up, you probably won't need to alter it much after that.

I googled your query and read in some forums just now that there is apparently a bug in Active Title Bar size change in Windows 7 (I think that's accessed via the 2nd group above), where the Systray notification icons get bigger or smaller as you make the Active Title Bar bigger or smaller.

Hope this helps or is of use.

IainB:
As an afterthought:
You could try this in conjunction with - or as an alternative to - adjusting the display as above: get some/different spectacles.
I need to use spectacles for reading only, but their focal point and depth of field make them useless for reading my laptop screen, as it is typically 24 inches or so away from my eyes. So I experimented  with some cheap drugstore reading glasses and found a pair at +1.50 magnification that had just the right focal point and a greater depth of field (for my eyes) to enable me to read the screen with ease, and they could also help with reading printed hardcopy closer up and further away (though they were not as good as my reading glasses for close up). The prescription reading glasses cost over $100/pair. The drugstore reading glasses cost $30 for two pairs. So I buy two pairs and have something in reserve when a pair in use starts to fall apart. They usually break at the weakest point - which seems to be the spring-loaded hinges - after a while, because I always have them hanging via a lanyard around my neck.

Possibly useful tips re the display:
(a) GPU adjustments: when I switched to my HP ENVY 14 laptop (Win 7-64 Home Premium), I found the display incredibly glary (needed snow-goggles). After googling around I upgraded to the latest driver and Catalyst Control Centre (toolkit) for my AMD Radeon GPU, and adjusted the settings. In particular, I turned down the brightness and turned up the gamma. I saved different settings to presets, so I could switch to different presets to suit the task (e.g., image viewing, or reading). This made the screen much less glary and easier to read, and those small icons came up much clearer and with deeper hues.

(b)Turning on and adjusting ClearType: probably a "must" as well, though it probably won't affect the icons.

Curt:
 :) my spectacles are $500 reader's-glasses, specialized for my monitor screen.

Thanks a lot for the GPU tip; I never would have thought so. You have given me something to test! :up:

vlastimil:
One hint that may or may not be useful. You can change the resolution of the whole Windows and everything will get bigger - icons, fonts, window captions... Right-click on Desktop, click Personalize, then Display in the lower left corner and then select a scaling factor, 125% is pretty good on a FullHD display (I am using it myself) and 150% may be even better for you. There seems to be a glitch in Windows 7, some fonts are not scaled properly, but if you simply re-apply the Aero theme after switching the resolution, all will be fine.

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