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I am UX designer designing educational activities for schools. These a responsive websites. When I have come to do QA I have seen everything is HUGE on Windows. The devs tell me that default resolution for Windows is 150%... Um – what? I've been in this game a long time and I have not encountered this. This makes no sense... Has anyone encountered something like this?

Tim Martin
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    Windows does not default to anything other than 100%. Anything other than that is a user-selected option. Ask your devs for an official document from MS in support of their claim. – Ken White Nov 15 '19 at 02:14
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    The Win10 installer no longer picks 96 dpi (aka 100%) as the default resolution. It picks a number that is appropriate for the monitor size. Pretty essential with hi-res LCD panels very affordable these days, picking 100% would produce unreadably small text. – Hans Passant Nov 15 '19 at 09:21
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    @KenWhite: that is not or no longer true. On displays that are very high definition windows will scale to 125% or 150% depending on the pixel density (~DPI) of the screen. In fact on my 4k 55" QLED LG screen it scales to 250% or even bigger. My guess is that Microsoft realised that many screens these days are touch enabled and hence need more space. – theking2 Jun 11 '21 at 07:20

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It seems like Windows tries to find a good physical size for its icons, and that falls upon the resolution and the physical size of the screen.

For our end users, display scaling is a platform technology ensuring that content is presented at a consistent and optimal–yet easily adjustable–size for readability and comprehension on every device.

I have several laptops to check what the recommended scaling was set as.

15' laptop at 1920x1080: recommended scaling was 125%.
17' laptop at 1366x768: recommended scaling was 100%.
12' tablet at 2160x1440: recommended scaling was 150%.

because the density of the pixels are different on all these screens, windows appears to automatically set a scaling value that it thinks looks like a good size.

Other examples
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forgehe
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    *Recommended scaling* is not *default scaling*. Windows doesn't default to anything but 100%. Anything other than that is selected by the user. – Ken White Nov 15 '19 at 02:13
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    The 15' laptop I just purchased was set to 125% scaling (their recommended scaling). On the fresh install on the 12' tablet, it also set itself to 150% scaling. At 100% scaling the icons are too small to use the tablet properly. – forgehe Nov 15 '19 at 08:28
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    If your system OEM decides to configure it to other than the default, that would be their decision. *Recommended* does not mean *default*, it means *recommended*. We've just recently migrated nearly 100 machines of various types from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Enterprise (by reimaging the machines), including laptops and desktops, and I've not seen any that set the resolution to other than 100% and claimed it was *default*. – Ken White Nov 15 '19 at 13:20
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    Again, @KenWhite, not true. When was the last time you installed Windows on a modern device? – theking2 Jun 11 '21 at 07:22
  • @theking: You're nagging me about a comment written 2 years ago? Congratulations. And the answer to your question is *last week*, and yes, things could have changed in the past two years. Comments are not usually monitored to see if they're still current - they're considered transient in nature. – Ken White Jun 11 '21 at 11:55
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This is a bug. Once a user chooses their preferred setting, Windows should leave it alone. I have resigned myself to resetting it manually each time I logon.

steve
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