
These common display problems are due to various types and ages of equipment, differences in how your program was originally designed to display, and differences in the way different versions of Windows and your graphic card software will try to handle the program’s display needs.


Scroll down to the bottom of this article for help with this “stretching” problem. The program graphics appear stretched w-i-d-e or “fat” on the screen. The program’s graphics appear small in the middle of your screen with a big black area around it.Ģ. There are two common problems displaying some older software on newer monitors with higher screen resolutions.ġ. The top setting in Windows 8 was 150 percent.Print this important Display Sizing note.

You can turn this feature on by unchecking the box next to “Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays.” If you decide disable individual scaling by leaving this setting checked, Windows 8.1 gives you a higher maximum setting of 200 percent. The operating system then interprets this for each monitor, selecting a unique percentage value tailored to that display. Opening the display settings in the Control Panel (click Appearance and Personalization, then Display) displays a window where users can select “Smaller” or “Larger” instead of a percentage value.

The Windows 8.1 now offers an advance in this direction. What was needed was a setting that could adjust each screen’s scaling individually to an appropriate size. Setting a scaling value that made things look good on one screen caused them to shrink or grow on other screens, so that the sizes were still different. Windows 8 lets you make items look bigger on all displays by setting a percentage called “scaling.” This worked great for increasing text size for easier viewing when all the monitors were similar in size and resolution, but did not solve the problem of varying sizes when mixing an ultra-high resolution screen with an ordinary one-a scenario that is becoming more common as prices on ultra-high resolutions continue to fall.
