Ed Bott - Windows 10 Support Secrets

79 CHAPTER 6 | Taking charge of hardware Figure 6-2: The Recommended resolution is usually the native resolution of your display, Changing the resolution usually makes for a fuzzier display and possible eyestrain. Modern portable devices, including the latest members of the Microsoft Surface family, often have relatively small displays with very high resolutions. At those resolutions on a large display, such as one that measures 24 inches or more diagonally, program windows look perfectly normal. But if you shrink that display to a mere 12 or 13 inches diagonally without changing anything else, windows and dialog boxes become impossible to read. That’s where the Scaling control on the main Display Settings page comes in. In Figure 6-1, you can see it’s set to the recommended value of 200%. That change adapts the appearance of apps and interface elements so that they’re a comfortable size. If you connect a large external monitor to that same PC and then sign in, Windows automatically detects the larger display size and sets the scaling to 100% so that it looks normal. Users don’t need to accept the recommended scaling. If your vision is as sharp as that of a red-tailed hawk, you can turn scaling down to pack more information on the page. Conversely, you can turn scaling up, even on a large monitor, to make type easier to read without changing the native resolution. Just keep in mind that some apps might look a little strange with that sort of intermediate scaling. One of my favorite recommendations for people who want to enhance productivity is to add a second monitor. With two (or more!) displays, you can arrange app windows side by side. Download statistics using a web browser, use those numbers to create a chart in Excel, and paste that chart into a Word document, all without having to continually switch contexts.