Extremely small cursors on both the front panel and the block diagram

[Bob_Schor]

You can say "Thank you, Microsoft, for giving me a tablet with a small screen and an insanely-high number of pixels, so that the pixel size is microscopic".

If you are running Windows 10, you will probably see that your Icons and Text have been increased by 300% or more.  Most programs can recognize when they need to "accomodate" an unreasonable pixel density, but some (I guess LabVIEW fits into this, but I helped a colleague with a new laptop fix PhotoShop, which has all the text in 2 point type).

Here's what you do -- go find your display properties.  Look at the X and Y resolutions (they are probably on the order of 2000 each).  Change them to exactly half that, and your problems are solved.  Windows will recognize that you are using your display in a more reasonable manner, and will change its magnification to 150% (so icons and text will look the same), and now your LabVIEW cursors should be better, as well.

Bob Schor

[kaneem]

So, as I mentioned earlier I had reinstalled Windows 10 and the small cursor issue had vanished (not quite a pun, but dangerously close). A few days later however it reoccurred again. I had not installed any new applications. It just occurred over night. I can only put it down to windows updates. The issue is present in MS MS Word too but only when moused over certain areas of the window (in the grey area beside the page).

So to summarise, the issue is back!

[diarmaede]

Here's what you do -- go find your display properties.  Look at the X and Y resolutions (they are probably on the order of 2000 each).  Change them to exactly half that, and your problems are solved.  Windows will recognize that you are using your display in a more reasonable manner, and will change its magnification to 150% (so icons and text will look the same), and now your LabVIEW cursors should be better, as well.

---

Tried that.  No luck.

[mcduff]

@ kaneem

Sorry to be off topic, but would you mind stating what kind of benchmarks are used in your comparison test between version 7.1.1 and later versions? (Just curious)

On topic, in my opinion, LabVIEW has never been strong in the UI department, that is, there is always a need to specify fonts of a particular size in INI files otherwise they do not scale well when the user changes their display settings.

cheers,

mcduff

[MSingh]

I have the exact same issue.

I was using LabVIEW 2015 on Windows 10 and decided to install LabVIEW 2017 (and a patch was also installed by NI update service) to check out the new features. Right after the 2017 install, I opened 2015 and my cursors were all tiny, just like the screenshot in kaneem's post. I also noticed the cursors getting small in MS Word as well. I uninstalled 2017 but the damage has been done and I can't get the cursors to come back to their normal size. Very Annoying!!

Anyone has any ideas other than the ones already in the topic posts?

[Bob_Schor]

As I mentioned in an earlier post on this topic, this is probably a "feature" (+ a bug) of modern (Laptop, primarily) displays that cram a whole lot of pixels into a small space (for example, my Dell 15" Inspiron has a native resolution of 3840 x 2160, twice my older 15" resolution of 1920 x 1080).  Windows 10 (and probably not Windows 7, don't know about Windows 😎 seems to be partly aware that if they display at "native resolution" (where icons are 32x32 pixels), everything will be teeny-tiny, so they do some "magic" in rendering.

But not all routines are "pixel aware".  Hence Windows gives you the option of setting the Screen Resolution to a smaller size, such as 1920 x 1080.  If you look at the Display settings, you'll see there's also a Scale setting that scales up text, icons, etc., but not all apps seem to know how to use this (hence the problems).  When I change my Laptop resolution to 1920 x 1080, Windows changes the Scale setting from 250% to 125%, which keeps things looking normal.

For what it is worth, LabVIEW 2016 displays just fine when the Screen is set to "full resolution" or "half resolution".  I have removed LabVIEW 2017 (well, no, I couldn't remove it, so I reformatted my hard drive and didn't reinstall LabVIEW 2017) so I can't comment on its behavior, but the "half resolution" trick should work ...

Bob Schor

[MSingh]

Hi Bob,

Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately, changing the resolution and scale setting didn't help. The cursors are still extremely small.

I think the LabVIEW 2017 installer changed some Windows 10 settings that messed up the cursor sizes.

[kaneem]

The bench-marking we used is simply running our built LV application software and measuring the FPS achieved. We could not identify any specific functions that were slower. We spend a lot of time dissecting the code and measuring performance by profiling VI's but nothing individually really stuck out. Everything was just slower in general. Note, the main our application contains over 2.3k VI's. We revisited this upgrading every couple of years and we end up back to the same conclusion. Since we do purchase the newest version every year of LabView we would like to move up and use it! I do like many of the new features the new versions bring. But, for now....

[zoom_007]

Good afternoon everyone,
I have a small cursor on the front panel and the block diagram with LabVIEW 2014, 2015 and 2016 32bit and 64bit (graphics card resolution 3840x2160 and Windows-10-Pro 64bit).
Experiments with low graphic card resolution does not have a positive effect.

"Solution":
If you want to work with LabVIEW under Win-10 again, you should go back to Windows 10 Image 1607 (June/July 2016) and prohibit the Windows update (e. g. with the tool O&O SU10).
It is clear that this is only a temporary solution.
I personally define the problem above as a critical error and I think that National Instrument has to fix it really fast.
I hope the LabVIEW community will support me with the same opinion.

Greetings, Igor Gunko

[Rechardz]

i also encountered this issue,

i have to switch OS back to 1607...

The high DPI compatibility is always a issue of Win10.