Adjusting windows border width in Windows 8

Window borders are not something you usually think about. They're just there, keeping a visual cue of the current workspace. Did you could change the width of these borders? Some folks want just like small borders.

Shrinking the border provides a bit of a cleaner feel to the windows, and gains a couple of extra pixels in the workspace. In Windows 7, it was pretty easy to open the control panel and adjust to your liking. Windows 8 doesn't have this feature in the control panel, but you can adjust the border width with a straightforward registry change.

There are two settings you can adjust that affect the border width, each having a range of 0 to -1500. The default setting for the BorderWidth property is -15, while the default for PaddedBorderWidth is -60.

To make a thicker border, simply increase the integer value in these fields:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics] "BorderWidth"="-15" "PaddedBorderWidth"="-60"

Higher numbers (for example -1000) will give you a thicker border, while lower numbers (0 or -1) will give you thinner borders.

After you have made the changes, you'll need to log out, then back in, to see the changes.

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Posted: 2012-11-05
By: dwirch
Viewed: 2,409 times

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