A couple weeks ago I received a Dell 20.5" flat panel at work. It's a montrous beauty with 1600×1200 resolution.

Now, I'm a young dude, but default fonts in Windows XP at 1600×1200 resolution are tiny. On a CRT monitor, you can just change to a lower resolution to resolve this problem, but LCDs look best on their intended resolution. So, what to do? Below are some tips that helped me:

Use Larger Fonts:

  1. Right-click on the desktop and choose Properties
  2. On the Settings tab, click Advanced
  3. Under the Display section, choose a larger font DPI. I found the Large Size (120 DPI) to be too large, so I chose custom and settled on 115% (which is 110 DPI)

Fix up scraggly icons in the Quick Launch bar

I use the Quick Launch bar to hold several (18) shortcuts to my most frequently used programs. (My taskbar is set to double-width, so I have 9 icons on each row.) When I changed to the higher resolution for my new LCD, the icons in the Quick Launch bar looked terrible. The edges were jagged and pixelated–very distracting. You can fix this like so:

  1. Right-click on the desktop and choose Properties
  2. On the Appearance tab, click Advanced
  3. In the Item drop-down box choose "Active Title Bar"
  4. Adjust the Size value. You may need to experiment with different sizes to get the desired results.

I also adjusted my text editor to slightly larger fonts and my tweaking was complete.

One problem though: After increasing the size of the Active Title Bar, the Quick Launch icons look better, but the icons in the system tray now look jagged. Anyone have a solution for this? I think it may be program specific because not every system tray icon looks bad.