
Since last year’s dalliance with meningitis, which damaged my eyesight a little, I’ve found the standard Window scrollbars just a little too narrow for my liking.
It may only take a second or two more to adjust my mouse so that they are hovering right over them but those additional few seconds all add up. “Mony a mickle macks a muckle”, as we say in Scotland.
So last week I went looking for a way to increase the scrollbar width.
Windows 7 offers an easy way to do this within the Control Panel > Personalisation interface. Windows 8.x, however, doesn’t. You need to guddle about in the Windows Registry.
Here’s what I did:
- Win + R to open the Run dialog box.
- When the User Account Control dialog appears, click Yes.
- Type regedit, then click OK.
- Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Control Panel / Desktop / WindowMetrics
- Locate the two keys: ScrollHeight and ScrollWidth. These will both be set to -255.
- Change both to -375 to make them a little wider. (One site I visited recommended between -100 for thinner, and -1000 for thicker).
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Either restart the Explorer process in Task Manager, or log out and back in again, or reboot.