My wife just got a brand new Dell Inspiron 600m. We got the higher-resolution 1400x1050 display (14.1" diagonal). I measure it to be 125dpi, although the machine came configured, from Dell, at 120dpi, which is almost a standard Windows configuration. With some digging, I managed to find a half-way decent blog post about how one might normally go about configuring this stuff correctly, although it appears that Dell, in fact, did configure it this way out of the box.

So far, things mostly work, with the glaring exception of the System Tray. All of those little bitmap icons were unceremoniously scaled up, and the results are almost ugly enough to make me want to force the whole computer back to the standard 96dpi, but I think the otherwise larger text is a real feature. What I want is a way to force the System Tray to render the icons nice and tiny and otherwise leave things in their enlarged state. Any idea how to do this? Any other hacks out there? There seems to be a chorus of "well, maybe it's fixed in Longhorn", but that doesn't do me a whole lot of good...

I'm in the same boat. My Dell XPS Gen 2 ships with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200. For the most part, I can't complain, as the screen is vibrant and crisp. The downside, however, is that my taskbar icons are fuzzy and blurry, as are most Microsoft Office toolbars. Internet Explorer has alot of trouble with resizing images, as well. I guess it's a good thing I don't use it.

You're stuck with it. I've been trying to find a solution to this problem for years now. Anything which isn't the standard 75dpi means fun down the line when you realise that the resizing code in Windows does odd things. Controls won't line up properly in some apps anymore etc...

The Windows standard is 96dpi. The only solution that gives the least amount of headaches is to leave it at the 96dpi setting and just adjust the font size for everything.

The only font you will not be able to resize is the system font. Unfortunately I can't remember where it's used, but I'm sure after you resize everything else you'll notice rather quickly.

Icons in Windows are just terrible because it doesn't use any type of nice graphics scaling. If you're serious about icon scaling and the way a desktop looks you should just use Mac OS X.

You might want to try one of those custom Windows themes (at least research the sites) - they might have some customizing ideas that get you the look you want by using new icons, fonts, etc..

Bruno