Upgrading to VMware Fusion 6.x from 5.x – Windows 8 UI font/size change strangeness

This is a very quick post today, but relates to an issue I had after upgrading my VMware Fusion install from 5.x to 6.0.2.

I am running a Windows 8 SP1 guest VM for development purposes on my mac, and right after upgrading and booting my Windows VM noticed this. The issue is that all the Windows UI elements – icons, text, etc look humongous on my 1920×1200 LCD monitor. The macbook’s LCD itself looked OK though. You can’t really see it that well in the screenshot below, but trust me, the section below with a few icons was about a quarter of my screen.

resolution-issue

I knew this was a new setting that had somehow been toggled in Fusion since the upgrade, so I had a quick look around and found it. To disable this feature, go to your Virtual Machine Settings -> Display, and untick “Automatically adjust user interface size in Windows”.

automatically-adjust-user-interface-size-windows

Fusion will prompt you to logout of your current user session in the Windows VM. After logging back in again, things should be back to normal.

Hope that saves someone 15 minutes of looking for the cause in the future!