Legacy non-dpi-aware application resolution scaling?
- by Miles Erickson
Our environment prominently featuers an outdated but absolutely mission-critical Win32 application that is not dpi-aware. It is optimized for an 800x600 display. Most of our users now have 17"-20" displays with native resolutions ranging from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050. However, they still operate these displays at 800x600 because the text in this legacy application is otherwise too small. Of course, it also means that nothing quite fits on the screen in Office 2007.
Most of our workstations still run Windows XP, but some are on Windows 7 and there are more to come. About one-third of our users run the app remotely via MS Terminal Services, and the remainder run it locally.
Is anyone aware of any method that could be used to scale this specific application to about 170%, so that it would fill a 1280x1024 screen, without affecting other applications that work best at the display's native resolution? I know how to do this in Mac OS X, but I have never found a way to do it in Windows.
Of course, this ideally would be something that we could push out via Group Policy. I suppose we even could create a custom MSI package to re-deploy the legacy application with some sort of display virtualization layer, if such a thing exists.
