Picking a Desktop Icon Size

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated August 14, 2017)

1

If your desktop is like mine, it tends to gather icons—lots of icons. As I get older and my monitor resolution gets finer, I find it helpful to once in a while change up how those icons appear. Windows provides three different sizes (small, medium, and large) that you can switch between. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Windows provides three different icon sizes for your desktop.

If you want to try out different icon sizes on your system, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click anywhere on desktop. (Don't right-click an item on the desktop; right-click the desktop itself.) Windows displays a Context menu.
  2. Hover over the View option. Windows displays additional choices to the right.
  3. Choose the icon size option that fits your needs; they are the first thee options on the menu: Large Icons, Medium Icons, or Small Icons.

Windows immediately makes the change and adjust what you see on your desktop. The change remains in effect until you explicitly change it again.

 This tip (13129) applies to Windows 7, 8, and 10.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Forcing Excel to Sort Cells as Text

If you have a mixture of numbers and text in a column and you want to sort based upon that column, the results may not be ...

Discover More

Backwards Date Parsing

Enter information into a worksheet, and you come to anticipate (and count on) how Excel will interpret that information ...

Discover More

Hyperlinks from Headings to the TOC

A table of contents is a great way to help organize lengthy documents. In a default TOC, you can use each entry as a ...

Discover More
More WindowsTips

Modifying What is Started when You Start Windows

Did you know that Windows automatically starts extra programs whenever you boot your system? If you want to see which ...

Discover More

Disabling Automatic Updates

If you don't like that Windows automatically downloads and applies updates in the middle of the night, you can gain some ...

Discover More

Changing Behavior for Audio CDs

When you place an audio CD in you PC, Windows attempts to play the CD, by default. If you don't want Windows to behave in ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WindowsTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is 4 - 3?

2017-08-14 06:41:03

Henry Noble

Another old Windows feature that continues to work in Windows 10 is to point anywhere on the desktop and then roll the mouse scroll wheel up or down. The icon size adjustments using the scroll wheel are finer increments than the choices in View.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WindowsTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.

Links and Sharing
OUR COMPANY
OUR PRODUCTS
OUR AUTHORS
OUR SITES
 

Copyright © 2019 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.