Make icons in 'Show hidden icons' LARGE ?

[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?!
 

[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!

[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.

[Curt]

I have tried 125%, and almost everything got bigger.
What didn't change in size was, the icons in mention!!

[Ath]

What didn't change in size was, the icons in mention!!

-Curt (April 24, 2012, 06:50 AM)

Even after a re-logon (as required by this settings-change) or, more radically, a reboot?

[Curt]

-ehh... re-log-on only. The little special window got bigger, but no the icons, so I switched back to 100% at once, and re-logged-on again.

It is as if the area formerly known as the notification area, cannot change at all.

[PhilB66]

The "Notification Area" icons can be with 16x16, 20x20, and 24x24 pixel versions only.

Read all you ever wanted to know about the Notification Area in this article.

[Curt]

-thank you, Phil. Most useful link! 

So "16/20/24 pixels only" is what we have. A big mistake by Microsoft, but a mistake it should be easy to correct. Maybe in W8 ?

[IainB]

@PhilB66: Thanks. Interesting. Now we know.

So "16/20/24 pixels only" is what we have. A big mistake by Microsoft, but a mistake it should be easy to correct. Maybe in W8 ?

-Curt (April 24, 2012, 12:52 PM)

I wonder why that particular limitation had to be set though?
I suppose it could make the Taskbar too fat/cluttered.

[vlastimil]

Why? In the early Windows days (NT4 time), every icon on the used to be 16x16px. In Windows 7, the main application icons got bigger 32x32, but system tray icons stayed the same. These icons are for less important and less frequently used applications. (If you use a particular application via its system tray icon a lot, maybe you should re-configure it to behave like a normal application and not place its icon in the system tray. Then it would have the normal size in Win7.)

Back to the 24/20/16 sizes. The base size is still 16px and these other sizes are just multiplies of 16 in higher DPI modes: 16px*125% = 20px and 16px*150% = 24px. You cannot use 24x24 system tray icons in the normal 100% (96DPI) mode.

What Curt mentioned abode about the size of the system tray icons not changing after switching to 125% is actually not true. The tray icons got bigger - to 20x20px, but since everything else got bigger too, it is very hard to notice. A separate issue is that many authors do not optimize for higher DPI modes and only provide 16x16 icon. This icon is then scaled to 20x20px by windows and you'll notice some jaggies.

[tomos]

My experience with enlarging everything (laptop with win7, classic theme, to 125% I think) was fairly disastrous** and often very ugly.


? Maybe the easiest solution would be windows magnifier ?

when you need to check the icons out, use the Winkey and plus (+) symbol to enlarge the screen. Zooms in wherever the mouse is. If you want to go back to 100%, you have to release the Winkey and then press it again with the minus (-) symbol. A magnifier symbol stays active, you can close this by clicking it first, then close.


___________________________________________________
** problem was that dialogues were often too big for the screen - windows dialogues as well. Lots of software doesnt cater well to this option. There's loads of space wasted - wanting the text/icons bigger doesnt mean we want to waste space - especially not on a laptop with average resolution (as of 2011 anyways) and a 16:9 screen

[IainB]

My experience with enlarging everything (laptop with win7, classic theme, to 125% I think) was fairly disastrous** and often very ugly.
? Maybe the easiest solution would be windows magnifier ?
when you need to check the icons out, use the Winkey and plus (+) symbol to enlarge the screen. Zooms in wherever the mouse is. If you want to go back to 100%, you have to release the Winkey and then press it again with the minus (-) symbol. A magnifier symbol stays active, you can close this by clicking it first, then close.

-tomos (April 26, 2012, 05:09 AM)

Yes, "Ugly" was what I thought it was.
Thanks for the tip re Winkey and Plus/Minus key. I hadn't known that one. Handy.

[tomos]

Thanks for the tip re Winkey and Plus/Minus key. I hadn't known that one. Handy.

-IainB (April 26, 2012, 10:24 AM)

Dont remember where I picked that one up, but I noticed an article about the magnifier in Windows Secrets newsletter a while back: they were saying to go to the start menu and type m a g n i . .
So I sent them a mail saying the same as above. They responded by sending me a $25 voucher with Amazon.com - so I reckon they didnt know it either. I didnt know they gave vouchers, but I was happy to get it ;-)