What happens when a person with fat fingers touches a scroll bar, trying to move it up, down, or across? Little success he gets! This problem has been bothering some people for a long while working on touch-sensitive Windows laptops or tablets. The Scroll bar is a vertical or horizontal bar that appears when scrolling the content. It is visible to the extreme sides of the screen and sometimes at the bottom of the screen. If you find the Windows scroll bar hard to see or to use, you can if you wish, change the Scrollbar width.
Here’s how you can change the scroll bar width in Windows 11/10.
Make Scrollbar wider in Windows 11
To make the scrollbar wider and always show it in Windows 11, take these steps:
- Press Win+I to open Windows Settings
- Select Accessibility settings on the left side
- On the right side select Visual effects
- Now toggle the button to the On position for Always show scrollbars
This will show the standard, wider scroll bar always.
If you wish to change the width of the scroll bar, you will have to edit the Registry as follows.
Related: How to keep Scrollbars always visible in Windows 11
Change Scrollbar Width in Windows 11/10
Press Win+R in combination to bring up the Run dialog box. In the dialog box that appears, type REGEDIT and hit the OK button. If prompted by UAC, click on Yes.
Now, in the Windows Registry window that opens navigate to the following location –
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Select the key and in the right pane of WindowsMetrics, double-click ‘ScrollHeight’ word.
Instantly, a window should appear on your computer screen (EDIT DWORD). In the value data field of the window, enter a data value.
The default value for scroll width is -225. Entering 500 will double the width, which should be fine in my opinion.
But you can enter any value up to 1500. You could say, enter 1400 to make it even bigger. Remember, the more or higher the value, the wider is the scrollbar.
Next, double-tap on ScrollWidth in the right pane of WindowMetrics. In EDIT DWORD window, enter the same data value as entered for “ScrollHeight” and tap OK.
Now close Windows Registry Editor. For changes to apply, you’ll need to sign out and sign-in, back to your user account.
Open File Explorer and you will find that the scroll bar width has been changed.
This should resolve your problem. Now, you can easily move the scroll bar up-down or sideways easily, without much effort.
It goes without saying – Backup your registry or create a system restore point first!
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