Asus Zenbook has blurry icons

My Asus Zenbook (UX32VD) has a weird problem with some graphics. It is a 13 inch laptop with 1920 x 1080 resolution running Windows 8. Some graphics are very blurry and some are not. I find it very strange and have tried to upgrade my graphics card driver (NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M version 9.18.13.2018) with no luck.

The images below shows how the graphics are blurry:

Explore icon is normal, but Jottacloud setup icon and Hangouts icon are blurry.

Jottacloud setup to the left has blurry edges where the screenshot on the Jottacloud website has sharp edges.

Why are my computer doing this and how can I fix it? It looks like it only happens to some graphic elements, as you can see with the Explore icon in the taskbar looks sharp where the Jottacloud setup icon and the Hangouts icon looks blurry.

ThomasCle

Posted 2013-06-09T12:55:20.253

Reputation: 183

Are you using standard DPI or have you increased font size for better readability? – gronostaj – 2013-06-09T14:51:56.200

Answers

It appears as though you've changed the font scaling on your system from the default DPI (see How to Adjust Windows 8 Display Settings for High DPI/PPI Screens for details on adjusting this manually). The side effect of modifying this value is that it will scale everything displayed on your screen, including images and icons.

Unless a high-resolution/high-DPI icon at the proper resolution is available, Windows will scale any provided icon to the correct size, which introduces the artifacts appearing in your attached screenshot. This is a well documented side-effect (and also occurs under Windows 7 and some other OS'es), and is a natural conclusion for displaying content at a non-native scale.

Breakthrough

Posted 2013-06-09T12:55:20.253

Reputation: 32 927

1Windows 8 had set the scaling to Medium (125%) as standard, which caused it to look blurry. Your link made me found the place to solve it: In the Screen Resolution screen choose the Make text and other… line. – ThomasCle – 2013-06-09T15:34:18.160

-1

The Explorer Icons support 256 Px PNGs with 32Bit color while the other only provides smaller resolutions for the icons. That's why they look blurry when you scale the Desktop UI. Those high resolution icons where added in Vista, so it is the failure of the vendors of those tools.

magicandre1981

Posted 2013-06-09T12:55:20.253

Reputation: 86 560

So Windows 8 scales the UI when running with 1920 x 1080? – ThomasCle – 2013-06-09T14:16:10.347

I think ASUS activated it. Open the control panel (desktop), then choose “Appearance and Personalization” and “Display”. – magicandre1981 – 2013-06-09T14:19:16.773