The modern UI is the new face to Windows, no matter whether you like or not. I’ve decided to live with it, though most of my Windows 8 time is still spent on the classic desktop. One of the features on Metro UI is its predefined layout, including the number of rows of tiles you see on the screen and how big each of them is. For example, on a 10″ tablet, you only see 3 rows of the tiles on the screen, and each of them are intended to look bigger. Usually to a regular user, you will have to live with what’s been decided.
However, here comes an open source utility called Metro Scaler that lets you easily customize the basic look of Morder UI through a scaling slider so you can adjust those settings to meet your own preference.
Metro Scaler is a very simple portable tool that you can download directly from the open source project page on Codeplex. And you can simply double click to launch it after you have downloaded it. The main window is very simple, including only a preview screen and a slider. You can easily slide the slider to the size of the screen you want to optimize your Modern UI screen.
Once you are satisfied the setting, click Scale button. You will get a confirmation telling you that the change has been made but you will have to restart your Windows 8 machine to have the change taken affect.
Your Metro UI will be optimized and scaled to fit to the size of display you previous chose. One thing I noticed that depending on the size of your physical display, you basically will see the larger or smaller size of tiles but not necessary the exact number of rows like shown in the preview window. On my 14″ laptop, even though I select the scaling to 5″, I still see 4 rows of tiles when I log in.
Want more tweaking tools made for Windows 8, don’t forget to check out always updated A List of Windows 8 Tweaking Tools.