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I've been using Windows Deployment Server to deploy Windows 7 (64 bit) images and it works very well. However sometimes the deployed installation seem to default to 125% (medium) dpi settings (monitors are generally are 1920 x 1200) which I do not want and change back to 100% (smaller) settings. I do log off as required and the 100% setting correctly takes effect. However, some applications (notably seem to be 32 bit apps) still seem to run at 125% resolution even though Windows and most applications are running at the 100% setting.

Note that some of the machines do not suffer from this problem and the affected applications are fine for these ones. I have not been able to work out what is different about these machines.

I'm not even sure that this is related to Windows Deployment Server. I think it is do with Win 7 defaulting to 125% initially and somehow this gets stuck for some applications.

What I would like to know is how can I stop this from happening and correct the existing affected machines. The affected applications do not behave very well under the high DPI settings (layout problems and truncated text).

Strangely I can't find any reports of others affected by this issue (is it just me?)

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    Is it a specific application or set of applications every time? Could you name a couple? We started out using WDS but now we're primarily using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit for everything including application installation. WDS is primarily used now for PXE booting clients to the Lite Touch images </tangent>... If you give me an example I'll see if we at least get the same results.
    – maik
    Nov 25, 2009 at 5:17
  • Yes, it does seem to be a specific set of apps. One is a Delphi based time recording app, another is Visual Sourcesafe v8.5. PowerBuilder 11.0 (a development environment) may be affected although some of that seems to be it defaulting to a 10 point font rather that the normal 8 on the affected machines. I have noticed the normal machines have the "Smaller - 100%" option flagged with (default) whereas the problem machines have "Medium - 125%" flagged with (default) on the "Make it easier to read what's on your screen" settings.
    – IainS
    Nov 26, 2009 at 2:14
  • I wonder if it is related to me adding the appropriate driver packages to the deployment server. So during the installation of the client, it sees the appropriate driver, installs it, sees that a high resolution is present and defaults to 125%. I really don't want it to do that though. And now I want to be able to undo it.
    – IainS
    Nov 26, 2009 at 2:17

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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OK I have found the answer. It looks to me like this is really a Windows 7 bug (and not really related to WDS) since you get different behaviour depending on whether the video driver is installed at initial install time or later.

Apparently if you install Windows 7 and it finds the appropriate driver and determines that your screen has a high native resolution it will default to 125% font size and actually change the bitmaps fonts for MS San Serif, MS Serif and Courier. It actually uses different files for these fonts depending on the resolution Windows selects at install time (and only at install time as far as I can tell - not if you manually change font scaling).

Here is a link to where I found a good explanation and solution by changing the registry. Here is the actual registry change if you don't want to go to the link (this is only for English Windows - go to the link if you are running a different language version):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts]
"MS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24"="SSERIFE.FON"
"MS Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24"="SERIFE.FON"
"Courier 10,12,15"="COURE.FON"

To my mind if it is necessary to change the fonts when you go to 125% or higher font scaling then surely it should also be undone when the user changes back to 100% font scaling. Doing this font hacking only at Windows install time and only sometimes, with no warning that this is being done is just wrong. It certainly lead me to think that my Windows installations were corrupt in some strange way for quite a while.

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