Display Settings

[mgerbasio]

Hi,

I'm running Workstation 10 on a notebook (Surface Pro 3) with Win 8.1 (64 bit) as the host and Win 7 (32 bit) as the guest. No problems running the guest os.

I'd like to connect to a second screen when I'm in my office but can't seem to get the correct resolution or a sharp screen on the guest OS. The Surface has a resolution of 2160 x 1440 and the second screen has a resolution of 2560 x 1440. In Win8, if I run at the guest at full screen the resolution changes to 3840x2160 for the guest window. It seems to be scaling the guest window by 50% of the host screen resolution.

No problems with this running on my desktop with a Win7 x64 host OS using the same screen. I can't find a setting to change this scaling. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Lyno]

My Lenovo 3840x2160 under Client 5 has no way I can find to get its window to appear larger. The Windows 8.1 magnifier has fatal bugs. The small window font that appears is so small that it can only be read with a magnifying glass. I can reduce the resolution of my monitor to any size I want and the small window still presents itself with in 3840x2160 resolution. I assume there is a config file or some other way to let me set the resolution to whatever size I want but cannot figure it out.

I looked all over the VMware site for help and found none. Any help you can offer will be most appreciated.

[DigiTester]

I have a three monitor setup with Windows 8 host, one 3840x2160 and two 1600x1200 screens. After much fiddling the solution turned out to be simple: in Windows "Screen Resolution" window click "make text and other items larger or smaller" then select "smaller - 100%" and tick "let me choose one scaling level for all displays".

That last tick is what matters. Otherwise Windows will decide to scale the UHD monitor differently from the other(s) and VMWare Workstation will pick up on that and decide to give you 2560x1440 or worse in the virtual machine.

Hours of faffing and swearing and it turned out to be as simple as ticking "let me choose one scaling level for all displays".

[Curve15]

Wow!  That really did the trick for making VMs run correctly on a second display.  For instance, Ubuntu running on a 1920x1080 monitor using Workstation 11 was unusable before, now it works great.

Oddly, this was not the case for Workstation 10.  Under Workstation 10, scaling had some issues, but you could force things to work by resetting the auto scaling.  I could not get that trick to work with Workstation 10.

This has also solved similar issues with the Win 10 preview running on Workstation 11.

Note to others:  Changing this setting will probably make fonts on your main screen very small if you have, for example, a Surface Pro 3.