Instant, Windows-wide screen zoom within Windows 7

If you spend much time browsing the Web at a high screen resolution (we’d classify that  as anything above 1,280x1,024) on a relatively small screen, you’re intimately familiar with browser-window zoom shortcut keys. (In Internet Explorer, for example, that’s the Ctrl key combined with the plus or minus key.) This shortcut quickly boosts the size of onscreen text. But wouldn’t it be handy to have that functionality available Windows-wide?

Windows Vista did have a system-wide magnifying tool, and that tool also appears in Windows 7. (The easiest way to access it: Go to the Start menu and type Magnifier into the search box.) But 7 is the first Windows version to natively include a browser-style magnification shortcut key at the operating-system level. In 7, try it: Hit the Windows key, combined with the plus or minus key.

This is an overarching zoom control that you can use in most normal programs or windows. (It doesn’t, for example, work in Windows Media Center, as you might guess.) By default, though, the zoom stepping is pretty large, with the zoom going from normal-size screen to elephantine with one key press. To adjust the zoom scale, go to the Magnifier tool (as described above), and click on the little, faint gear icon to see the Magnifier Options dialog. (It took us a while to find that one.) In the slider bar that you see at top, reduce the zoom level as appropriate:

We pushed ours all the way down to 25 percent, so each press of the key combination zoomed in baby-elephant steps.