There are some things Vista could have that would really draw me in. Sadly, I can’t seem to find out if any of these are part of the product or not. In posting this, I’m hoping someone can either answer or point me to an answer for some of the questions.

Number one on my Windows Vista wish list is that they virtualize the screen more.

What I want is actually very simple. I want to tell Windows – in one place – that my screen resolution is not 72dpi, but is in fact 125dpi. Once that is accomplished, all Windows elements should be scaled to that result.

For any application which does not specify drawing size, but rather specifies pixels – the new AERO graphics engine should do a simple calculation “X pixels * (125 / 72) = Y pixels” and draw it as Y. For fonts and other “vector” based drawing objects, this should be even easier as the curve calculations are already based on this kind of math.

If this is done properly, an 8pt font will take up the same physical area on a high resolution monitor as it does on a low resolution monitor. What’s more, it will fit properly in buttons because the number of pixels on the button have been properly sized and should match.

Some people may WANT that optimized screen real estate. That’s easily handled. They just need to set the DPI setting on back to 72, and their ultra-sharp tiny little fonts will be right back again. The only thing that could suffer – in theory – is looking at pictures. If something is supposed to be 10 pixels, it ends up being 17.36 for me. Rounding is where you get the “fuzzy” aspect.

Why does this matter? Right now, I’m looking at a 19” monitor which is optimized for 1280 by 1024 pixel resolution. The laptop is more extreme. It’s a 17” monitor that is 1920 by 1080. Making some simple assumptions that the pixels are square and aligned uniformly (which they are not, actually) the two monitors come out to about 86 and 125 pixels per inch respectively.

LCD screens are not like the bulky old “tube” based screens. The pixels aren’t projected onto a phosphor screen; they are actual hardware – like little light bulbs. If you decrease the display resolution, you’re getting less crisp representation at each point than you would at the optimize resolution because the dots themselves cannot change size. They must therefore be approximated.

Where this becomes a problem is that many aspects of the Windows screen are designed to be a set number of pixels in height or width. The unit of measure is in pixels, not inches. This includes fonts, title bars, buttons, icons, and all kinds of other things. Much of the time, Windows doesn’t know how many of those pixels fit on a linear inch of screen space on my screen. What people don’t realize is that the old standard has been to assume about 72dpi for screen resolution. That means on my laptop, with nearly twice that resolution, things tend to be on half the ideal size.