Solidworks scaling difficulties

Technical SolidWorks
1

I recently got an Alienware 17 R3 for CAD.

I installed Solidworks 2015-16 with the license code my team got for this year.

When I opened the program, I noticed that the buttons were minuscule and nearly impossible to distinguish from one another. I don’t know if this is because of the screen resolution (17.3 inch 3840 x 2160 UHD), the graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M), or something else.

I’m just wondering if anyone has experienced this problem on any computer, and if so, how they fixed it.

Note: Solidworks Composer and Electrical work fine

2

I’m guessing it’s your screen resolution. I’m running 1920x1080 and that is plenty small enough.

3

SolidWorks is pretty terrible with UHD screens. I have a Dell Precision M3800, and menus are all out of whack when running in High DPI mode (with scaling turned on).

4

It’s the high DPI display. SolidWorks won’t officially support them until SW 2016 (education version 16-17).

Try right clicking on the desktop icon, properties, compatibility, and check the do not use display scaling box.

5

If that doesn’t work, you can reduce your resolution and set the scaling parameter appropriately.

For example, on my Surface Book I run the display at 1920x1200 and have the scaling set to 125%. Looks great in SolidWorks.

Note that scaling changes require logging out/in to fully take effect.

6

That worked perfectly. Thank you.