Making your desktop icons and taskbar icons bigger on Windows 10

Recently we’ve had several people who asked how to make desktop icons and taskbar icons. And before we get flooded with suggestions for programs that promise to do this, (there are some programs that will do some of the same things as we show below) and some will give you more options when it comes to menu and taskbar transparency and coloring. Supposedly, Microsoft is going to address this in the big update for Windows 10 coming in early November 2015.

Anyway, we’re going to show you how to do it without downloading anything. If you know of a program that makes this easier and you are comfortable with it, that’s great. This is for those who want to know how to resize desktop icons and taskbar icons without downloading anything else,

Desktop Icons

Make your desktop icons huge or tiny with your mouse scroll wheel.

It’s really easy to change the size of your desktop icons… left-click anywhere on an empty place on your desktop, then hold down the CTRL key and move your mouse wheel forward (to increase the size) or backward ( to decrease the size). You can make the huge or very tiny – it’s up to you.

Taskbar and Notification Area Icons

Notification area and taskbar icons cannot be resized in Windows 10 without changing the display properties. Keep in mind if you change the display setting so the icons look larger, you’re going to change your display so everything looks larger text, menus, etc. This may be what you want if you’re continually squinting to see your screen.

Here’s how to do it:

First, make you that “Show small taskbar icons” is not checked in taskbar properties. Right-click on an empty area of your taskbar, choose “Properties” and make sure that item is not checked. If it is, uncheck it.

Now if they are still not big enough, read on.

Click Start/Settings (or press Windows Key + i ). In settings, click on System, then choose Display in the left pane.
Under “Change the size of text, apps and other items” move the slider to the right (try 125% and 150%). See below:

And don’t forget to click “APPLY” to save your settings. You’ll get a notice (but not a warning) that things will look better after you restart. You can either choose to restart then or later. See below:

Hope this helps make things nice and big for you 🙂