Default Windows is scaled to 150%?

Question

I am UX designer designing educational activities for schools. These a responsive websites. When I have come to do QA I have seen everything is HUGE on Windows. The devs tell me that default resolution for Windows is 150%... Um – what? I've been in this game a long time and I have not encountered this. This makes no sense... Has anyone encountered something like this?

Answer 1

It seems like Windows tries to find a good physical size for its icons, and that falls upon the resolution and the physical size of the screen.

For our end users, display scaling is a platform technology ensuring that content is presented at a consistent and optimal–yet easily adjustable–size for readability and comprehension on every device.

I have several laptops to check what the recommended scaling was set as.

15' laptop at 1920x1080: recommended scaling was 125%.
17' laptop at 1366x768: recommended scaling was 100%.
12' tablet at 2160x1440: recommended scaling was 150%.

because the density of the pixels are different on all these screens, windows appears to automatically set a scaling value that it thinks looks like a good size.

Other examples
One
Two