The new Windows is basically Fischer-Price Vista.  Huge buttons and huge icons—which for no apparent reason also look like buttons.  Will it sing a lullaby?

I have my screen resolution set to 1680 x 1050, my monitor’s highest resolution.  And yet my icons used to look like something off a child’s nursery toy.  I really thought they were going to act like buttons instead of icons (single rather than double-click to activate).  Welcome to Fischer-Price Vista.

You can actually make them even larger!

I could set my icon size so that I would be able to fit a maximum of 18 icons on my desktop.

But that’s not exactly what I’m after in life.  You?  I mean, I know there are folks out there with vision problems and for them this is probably a shining light, a beacon.  Great.  It’s easy to do, but what about the other direction?

Well, I have found a solution which gives me a bit more desktop real estate:

As you can see this is much more acceptable, even if that Fischer-Price feel doesn’t exactly go away.  Here are the necessary steps to get where you want to go.

• Right-click on the desktop and choose View –> [Large Icons, Medium Icons, Classic Icons] (“Classic” changes to “Small” with Win7)

… or…

• Ensure the desktop is selected (by left-clicking it)
• Ctrl-[scroll] (using your mouse wheel) to adjust the icons to your preferred depth

See?  Quite basic, really.