Blurry / pixelated notification area (system tray) icons on high DPI

This issue is quite common. If we use Windows on high resolution displays then DPI should be at 120, 144 (125% and 150% respectively) or even higher. By default, it makes some icons on notification area look distorted. Windows 10 system icons like Action Center, Volume, Network etc. look as they should but almost all 3rd party icons are terrible. And it doesn’t matter whether application is high DPI aware or not. Even if applications have appropriate high resolution icons, Windows make them look distorted anyway. To ensure you may place latest versions of Firefox or uTorrent (these checked personally) to notification area and see how their icons look at 150% scaling setting; fuzzy obviously. Then just set it to 100% and switch back to 150%. Now they are scaled correctly and look crisp at 144 DPI. But as soon as you reopen applications, windows make their icons ugly again.

It makes me think that there is something wrong with Windows scaling method not icons or 3rd party applications like many threads say. And I would really like to find solution and make Windows 10 desktop look correct on hi-res display. I had the same issue with Windows 7 before and resolved it but I don’t remember how unfortunately. I think I did like explained here:

http://windowanswers.com/windows-7/...ray-notification-area-look-low-res-88027.html

But I don’t have Windows 7 installed to check at the moment and Windows 10 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Appearance\New Schemes\ registry key is empty. If anyone knows where these settings are located in Windows 10, please let know. I mean scaling settings for notification icons or their size options.

Simple experiment with DPI switching confirms that problem is related to Windows and its scaling algorithm, not applications or their icons. I want to understand what exactly prevents Windows from picking appropriate high resolution icons or scaling them correctly considering that necessary icons are available and OS actually can do thing right, but some settings have to be modified first obviously. I also think this information would pretty be useful for many.

 

I was setting up an notebook with an 1080p IPS display running Win10 , webpage text looks crisp as anything but, device manger and other Win10 boxes look blurred as anything i was shocker.

How can i fix this?

John.

 

Set your scaling to 100%. I believe Windows sets default to 125% or 150% which can result in this blurriness mess.

 

You did not read my post carefully. The question is how to set things up at 150% (or higher scaling level) and find appropriate settings so everyone with hi res display could use Windows Notification Area without annoying blurriness. 100% is the most obvious setting but not an option for high PPI screens.

 

Hi.

I found this discussion and a possible fix, a reg patch see end posts.

http://www.tenforums.com/general-discussion/7423-blurry-text.html

John.

 

Users in that thread are reporting that the current build of W10 has addressed this issue without need of altering the registry.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

My problem was on an 1080p IPS notebook for nephews sons Christmas i was setting up, so all updates were might not have fully installed, I have some ram to install soon so i will check everything is up to date when i install the ram before i install any reg patches.

John.

 

Thanks for your suggestion John. I read this thread as well but this fix applies to fonts not icons and actually works at 125% scaling factor only. With 150% and above “system” fonts are blurred anyway and notification area icons ugly with anything above 96 DPI.

 

Did this happen on Win7 and win8 as i must have had an 1080p screen and did not see the problem, My current 20" 1600x900 IPS has no problems on Win10 so it must be 1080p or over?

John.

 

You can try setting 150% scaling and follow my first post to see what I mean. 20” 1600x900 might be comfortable even at 100% but I am using 14” 1080p so even 125% is too small.

 

Just in case if anyone interested, mentioned issue have been partially fixed in Bulid 14393 (Anniversary Update / RS1) finally. Some notification area icons are still blurred, but look way better than ever before on high DPI.