Our environment prominently featuers an outdated but absolutely mission-critical Win32 application that is not dpi-aware. It is optimized for an 800x600 display. Most of our users now have 17"-20" displays with native resolutions ranging from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050. However, they still operate these displays at 800x600 because the text in this legacy application is otherwise too small. Of course, it also means that nothing quite fits on the screen in Office 2007.
Most of our workstations still run Windows XP, but some are on Windows 7 and there are more to come. About one-third of our users run the app remotely via MS Terminal Services, and the remainder run it locally.
Is anyone aware of any method that could be used to scale this specific application to about 170%, so that it would fill a 1280x1024 screen, without affecting other applications that work best at the display's native resolution? I know how to do this in Mac OS X, but I have never found a way to do it in Windows.
Of course, this ideally would be something that we could push out via Group Policy. I suppose we even could create a custom MSI package to re-deploy the legacy application with some sort of display virtualization layer, if such a thing exists.
Two suggestions for you:
For the users running the application locally on Windows 7 you might look into installing Windows XP Mode on their computers and installing tha application there.
For the users running the application from Terminal Services you might look into publishing the application using W2K8 TS Remote Apps or using third party software like 2X on W2K3 to just publish the app, at it's native resolution.
Something doesn't add up. What kind of monitors were they using before? Traditionally, the "ideal resolution" for older CRTs kept resolutions near 100 dpi, which is also what most desktop LCDs use for native resolution. The app shouldn't be significantly smaller, just take up less desktop space on the larger monitor.
Now, if your users were running 17" or 19" CRTs at 800x600, then that's a different story.
That said, have you tried simply using Win 7's high-dpi support? My understanding of it is that it will scale older apps that aren't high-dpi aware fairly well. It won't be perfect, but it shouldn't be worse than running an LCD at non-native resolution.
Alternatively, you could try to find monitors with a lower overall dpi for your users. 22" 1680x1050 or 19" 1280x1024 monitors will give a bit of a boost.
Set up a windows Terminal Server where the screen DPI (font size) setting is turned way up, and install the application on there. Then have the users (with their normal DPI screens) run the app remotely.