The Windows Calculator does not increase its font size or appearance if your screen resolution is relatively large. It will always display the characters in an eight pixel font size which displays them ridiculously small if your use a large screen resolution.
Microsoft does not offer a way to change the display of the Windows Calculator or adjust the font size automatically depending on the screen resolution of the computer which means that we, once again, have to rely on third party tools to change a default Windows application so that we can work with it.
You do need a software called Resource Hacker for this, the link is at the end of this article. Unpack Resource Hacker and start ResHacker.exe. Now click on File > Open and browse to C:\Windows\System32 and open calc.exe.
Now browse to the entry 101 and click on the child 1033 (1033 can be another value on your computer, it should display only one entry, click on that). You see many lines of code on the right window including the one important for us: FONT 8, "MS Shell Dlg"
You increase the font size by simply changing the 8 to another number. My suggestion would be to change it to 10 or 12. Click on Compile Script afterwards and you should see the changes immediately in the preview window.
Do the same for the entry 102, 1033. One is changing the scientific calculator while the other is changing the normal calculator.
Before:
After:
As you can see this makes a huge difference. Now save the new calculator using the Save As dialog, name it calc1.exe for instance. Please note that you can’t replace the original calculator from within the software because it is system protected.
The best option in my experience would be to change the shortcut in the start menu to point to the new calculator. Just right-click the shortcut, select properties and change the path under Target accordingly. If you saved it as calc1.exe for instance which was saved to system32 you simply add the char 1 to the path.
I have not found a way to replace the system calculator with the newly created one. If anyone has experience in that matter contact me please.
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GREAT tip.
How ridiculous of Microsoft not to enable changing the font size of such an essential tool. So typical.
I can’t find a way to actually save the altered file. No matter what I type as a filename, and wherever I try to place it, I get a message that states the file already exists. Any ideas?
Thanks!
You have to save the altered file as a different name, e.g. calc1.exe
This should work – it did for me.
Sam
There are two calc.exe files in windows folder. One is in C:\WINDOWS\system32, while the other locates in C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache.
Usually, we use the file in the root “system32″ folder. The one in the latter one is the backup file, which will replace the calc.exe in \system32\ once the system monitors any change of the original file.
My solution is to replace the calc.exe in the “dllcache” folder first, then the one in the root “system32″.
Now the calculator I opened is the one with large font size.