How to make desktop icons smaller in Windows 7?

Do you want to make your desktop icons smaller or larger in Windows 7? There is an easy trick that allows you to scale a lot of things quickly.

Small Desktop Icons

Resizing your desktop icons to small or large desktop icons can be useful for many purposes and allows you to customize Windows 7 just as you want and need it.

Small Desktop Icons

In order to make your desktop icons smaller or larger do this:

1. Click on your desktop once to deselect everything.
2. Click on an icon
3. Hold CTRL and scroll down or up to make the icons smaller or larger. (do it carefully or you will end up with extremely large or small icons)

Small desktop icons vs. Large desktop icons:

You can have very large icons or very small icons, it’s up to you:

Large Desktop Icons

Small Desktop Icons

You can use the same trick to scale websites in firefox.

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Filed Under: Tutorials, Windows 7 Icons Tags: how to, Windows 7 Icons by sOliver - Monday, January 11th, 2010

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11 Responses to How to make desktop icons smaller in Windows 7?

Alex said:
May 24, 2010 at 9:26 pm

Thx man ! That works .
dhang said:
July 19, 2010 at 6:07 am

i’ve been annoyed of finding this on youtube,
i can only find it in here!
thanks a lot!
Jarrod said:
September 17, 2010 at 6:37 pm

Thanks. Didn’t know it was so easy
Barbara said:
November 18, 2010 at 9:54 am

This is nuts, everything is huge, and I can’t figure out to make it all normal again. I went to control panel,then to display. it won’t let me make it all normal again cause it so huge that I can’t go to the bottom of the page to click on apply, which i know it would work. not i am stuck with this. I am ready to take a hammer to this computer, and beat it into very small pieces and throw it all away.
saleumsai said:
February 7, 2011 at 12:42 pm

i just did know to make the icon smaller because i wan to get my web cam worked. thank you
OzDrDj said:
April 1, 2011 at 8:04 am

How do i do this on my laptop, I have no scroll wheel?
LesZ said:
May 12, 2011 at 12:31 pm

Works great for VISTA too. Thanks!
Gil Kibler said:
May 15, 2011 at 9:04 am

This works like a charm. Just remember, you can’t use a touchpad, you have to plug in or use a wireless mouse. Great tip. Thanks for the help.
Evelyn said:
June 1, 2011 at 4:20 am

Thanks! I hate large icons and on my windows 7 desktop, small are still rather large. I’m a minimalist when it comes to my desktop icon size. Now I’m happy.

Thank you again!
Andrew said:
June 4, 2011 at 2:30 pm

Right click on desktop and choose view / small icons.
K. Briggs said:
August 6, 2011 at 12:55 pm

Thanks, it’s the only thing that worked for me…and it worked great. The other advice that I read about right clicking properties did not work so I APPRECIATE it so much…it’s been bugging me…….lol