1. Increase Desktop Icon Size Windows 8

Windows 8's desktop mode mirrors that of Windows 7 by including desktop shortcuts that directly open programs or files. By default, Windows displays these grid-aligned icons using a 'medium' size. Although you can choose a different predetermined size, you can also incrementally change the size of these icons with your mouse wheel.

Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows shipped with an option to change the vertical and horizontal spacing of icons on the desktop. In Windows 8, along with many other small features, Microsoft has dropped Advanced Appearance Settings under which the option to change the default spacing of desktop icons was present.

Increase Desktop Icon Size Windows 8

In Windows 7, one could right-click on desktop, click Personalize, click Window color option, and then click Advanced appearance settings option to Advanced appearance settings dialog where settings for active title bar, active window border, desktop icon spacing, tooltip, window borders, scrollbar, selected items, menu and message box are present.

Windows 8 ships with only an option to change the text size of message boxes, menus, title bars, palette titles, icons, and tooltips. To change the the default color and font for above mentioned items in Windows 8, one needs to manually edit Windows Registry. About three months ago, we covered a free tool named Tiny Windows Borders to change the default size of window borders in Windows 8. This time around we are going to share a free tool to change the spacing on desktop icons in Windows 8.

Control Desktop Icons Spacing is a tiny program from the developer of Ultimate Taskbar Controller software to easily change the default horizontal and vertical spacing of desktop icons.

Download, run the program, and then drag the slider to the right of the screen to increase the default spacing between two icons. Once done, you may need to perform a system reboot to see the change. Restarting explorer.exe from the Task Manager mightn’t do the job.

Control Desktop Icons Spacing tool is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 8 systems. However, it doesn’t work on Windows RT.

You might also like to check our list of best tools available to customize the Windows 8 Start screen.