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by Doug Thews.
Original Post: Taskbar Icon Jaggies In Windows At 120DPI
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I just received my beast of a laptop today from Dell. The Inspiron XPS has a 3.4GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and a 60GB 7200RPM ATA drive. it also has a wide-screen 15.4" WUXGA LCD display. Sweet!
Unfortunately, the default setting for such a great display is 120DPI, causing all the graphics to shrink (because the dots per inch have compressed). To combat this, Windows allows you to use "Large Icons" in the Display Manager, but because the Taskbar icons and icons in the menu system aren't scalable (they're fit for 24x24 only), you end up getting jagged icons.
Another problem is with Internet Explorer which tries to auto-scale graphics for high-res (above 96DPI) displays. There's an IE registry setting called UsedHR that tells IE to try and proportionally scale fonts. The problem is, that a lot of sites end up looking like total garbage with jagged fonts everywhere! The personal Dell browser doesn't exhibit this problem. So, I ended up turning this value off. There's a Dell forum thread on this specific topic as well.
To get rid of the jagged icons, I got a little lucky. Just turning off Large Icons didn't seem to do the trick, so what I did was enable support for 120DPI, reboot, then turn on Large Icons, reboot, then manually change the Icon size to 24 (down from 32). This changed the size of the Taskbar icons, but left the desktop icons alone. I'm not sure if this was blind luck, but I'm going to try the same thing with my PC attached to an 18" LCD display (which should also be doing hi-res, but I've always hated looking at the jagged icons so I turned off support for it).
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