Blurry Monitors in Windows 8.1

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been rocking a new Lenovo T440S. I noticed that whenever I attached an extra monitor, the display would get blurry. Some quick internet research suggests that this may be related to Windows 8.1 auto-scaling that attempts to make things on different screens appear to be the same size. Luckily, Microsoft has published a support article that offers two solutions to this problem: disabling DPI virtualization for specific applications or lowering the Windows DPI setting.

Both solutions worked for me, but I opted for #2 since I’m not particularly interested in dealing with the problem on a per-application basis.

Here’s the short version of how to do that:

1. Go to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Display
2. Check Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays
3. Optional – Choose the scaling percentage to use (I use Smaller – 100%)
4. Click Apply

Author: Adam Prescott

I'm enthusiastic and passionate about creating intuitive, great-looking software. I strive to find the simplest solutions to complex problems, and I embrace agile principles and test-driven development. View all posts by Adam Prescott