How to setup an external monitor on a Surface Pro 3 (with docking station)?

Question

I've just installed my new Surface Pro 3 and connected my 1920*1080 monitor to it via DVI and the Surface docking station.

The external monitor is recognized correctly (as a PnP Standard Monitor, ASUS VH242), and the resolution is set to 1920*1080. Desktop, taskbar, the Charms bar and Windows dialogs look crisp on the external monitor, but all the programs I open appear fuzzy, as if scaled from a different resolution. This only affects the window contents, though, the title bars and control elements (as long as they are the standard Windows elements) are crisp.

It somehow looks similar to the problem some older apps have with the high-DPI display of the Surface tablet itself (because Windows scales them to 150% normal size), but this happens on the "low-DPI" 1920*1080 monitor.

Any idea how I can troubleshoot this?

Solution

For low PPI monitors like your 1080p Asus, you can set up scaling.

Right click on the desktop, Personalize, Display

and move the Change the size of all items slider all the way left (to "Smaller"). After this is done you need just to sign out and sign in back.

Comments

[Tim Pietzcker]

Thanks, this works for the external display, but now the size of items on the Surface's High-DPI display becomes tiny as well. Can this be set individually per display unit?

[Neurotransmitter]

@TimPietzcker, unfortunately not, you can't set the scaling on a per monitor basis. At least with standard Windows tools. But actually, using small 12'' Surface Pro 3 display along the desktop monitor in my opinion is not really convenient. Why not grab additional desktop monitor, or even two? You knew that this thing is capable of support of 3 external displays?

[Tim Pietzcker]

If that's really not possible, it's incredibly stupid. Of course I'm not using the Surface display at the same time as the external monitor, but when I undock it, I would like to use it without having to switch magnification back to 150%, log off, log back on so the changes take effect, and then perform the same in reverse when I re-dock it. That can't be the proper way to do it...

[Daniel B]

Making individual scaling possible is very difficult: Imagine a window that is partly visible on both a low and high DPI display. Whatever single resolution it renders at, one part will be blurry.

[Neurotransmitter]

@DanielB but what stops Microsoft from allowing a user to set up individual scaling for individual monitors? When the window travels across screens, it just need to be re-rendered once. I cannot see a problem here and hopefully Windows 10 will provide some kind of functionality like that.

[Neurotransmitter]

The question isn't about a resolution problem, but about a scaling problem.

[Daniel B]

@TranslucentCloud On the contrary, if a window is visible on multiple displays at the same time, it would need to be rendered multiple times. That’s probably not going to happen, and certainly not with Windows 10. As for “switching” DPI (according to the display a window is on): It tends to go wrong in many ways. Earlier, I connected my Retina MBP to a regular screen. After that, Firefox’ drop-down lists where very far from where they belong. This happened on OS X, which is very good at DPI stuff.

[Christoph]

What I find most confusing about this is that the "Change the size of all items" dialogue shown in the answer has an option "Le me choose one scaling level for all my displaysd", suggesting that if that option is not selected, different scaling levels will be applied to each monitor.

[Neurotransmitter]

@Christoph, this warning really confuses users and actually it means nothing, because different scaling levels cannot be applied to each monitor and more to say, you cannot setup different monitors separately. There is simply just one setup window for all.

[Neurotransmitter]

@Cristoph, this method is not really good, as far as its author suggest to decrease SP3 resolution to 1080x720. This might work for people not using their SP3 on-the-go, but I believe there are not much of them. When SP3 get undocked, you will need to restore native resolution back, which is certainly not convenient.

[Neurotransmitter]

@DanielB funny enough, like I foresaw, the next Windows, 10, does have independent scaling to each display. It works pretty elegant. When the window travels from a high-DPI display to a low-DPI, once it crossed the border it gets rerendered once. Finally!