Free Tools To Magnify Your Screen / Parts of it in Real Time (For Creative Guys / Designers and Guys who want to Magnify stuff during presentations).

September 11, 2006 · 1 min read

A Few days ago I had a discussion with a person from our creative team who informed me about (and liked) the fact that in MAC you could just zoom in and magnify any part of your screen in real-time.

This was one feature I could use during technical presentations as well. So I decided to go searching  for some free tools that let me do this same thing in windows and met a whole throng of free tools that let me do this. Here are the best two that I came across:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ZoomIt.html - (Everyone loves SysInternals:)) [Highly Recommended]

Pros: I Like the ability to scroll to Zoom deeper and Right click to come out. Typical Sys-Internal "No need to install" single Exe is particularly cool if you want to carry this thing around on a USB drive. Love the Pen Feature which lets me draw on and highlight parts of the zoomed area.

Cons: Pretty much zooms the entire screen. Doesn't let me choose the height and width of the magnifier or the particular areas on screen that I want to zoom.

http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ - Free, open source Magnification for Windows, Linux and Free BSD. [Highly Recommended]

Pros: I like the fact that I can choose the Magnification level, the size and the graphic tool feature is particularly interesting.

Cons: I can't zoom in and keep increasing the magnification level, on real time. Need to reach out for my system tray icon and set the Zoom Parameter which can make my presentations slow:)

Here's A of other free (and some paid) tools to achieve the same thing. Enjoy!

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Rajiv Popat

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