Increase the button size on Windows 7 Tablet PCs

Windows 7 wasn’t designed for the touch screen of a tablet PC.  The buttons and scroll bars are far too small to easily use Windows 7 on a tablet PC. It’s all too easy to click the small Close button rather than the small Minimize button.   Thankfully,  there’s a couple of easy tweaks to make the buttons and scroll bars much larger on a Windows 7 tablet PC.

To get to the tweak to increase the button size and scroll bar you need to drill through a few layers of windows.   First right click on the desktop and chose Personalize.   The window below should appear.

You can only increase the size of the buttons on Tablet PCs with a non-Aero theme so select Windows 7 Basic Theme and wait for it to be applied.  Select the Window Color link and the following window should appear.

From this window select Advanced appearance setting… and the following dialog box will appear enabling you to increase the size of the buttons and scroll bars for your Windows 7 tablet.

Select the Active Title Bar and set the size of the title bar to something larger – 50 works well.  Select the Scroll Bar item and set the size of the scroll bar to something larger – 50 works well. Click apply.