Some programs give you the option to zoom its screen. For example, in a browser (e.g., Internet Explorer or Firefox), you can zoom the page displayed on your screen. Adobe Reader gives you a similar feature to zoom the PDF file being viewed. Microsoft Word similarly allows zooming of the reading area. Windows Media Player and various Drawing applications have similar zooming features. However, many other programs do not have such feature to zoom the screen. In fact, even the main desktop screen of Windows (i.e., when no program is open) does not have any zoom feature. Moreover, even with the above programs, such as a browser or Adobe Reader or Microsoft Word, you can zoom only the reading / display area and these programs do not have a feature to zoom their full screen which includes their toolbars, menu bar, status bar, title bar, etc. ZoomIt is a free simple software which can zoom any screen on your computer and within any software. It can also zoom any part of any screen including the non-reading-area such as title bar, menu bar as well. So, it makes all parts of the screen within all software (including Windows itself) zoom-enabled!!!
ZoomIt is a light-weight software (download size is only 267 KB for its latest v. 4.0 which was released recently on August 5, 2009) with excellent features. It can be downloaded free from the Microsoft site. It is a screen zoom and annotation utility for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. As mentioned above, it can work on any screen on your computer – whether on the Windows main desktop screen or from within any software screen. Moreover, it can zoom every part of a screen and not just the reading or display area. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the system tray (the small area normally at the right-bottom part of the screen which contains the clock) and can be activated with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. It can be quite useful for making technical presentations. It runs on all versions of Windows.
This utility has been written by legendry programmer Mark Russinovich, whose company Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in July, 2006. He has written a large number of system utilities which are quite useful and are available for free download. The best aspect of his utilities is that they all are light-weight products but excellent in performance. The ZoomIt utility is a part of the Sysinternals suite which contains many other useful utilities.
Just to illustrate how ZoomIt can zoom any part of your screen, I have taken four images of a part of the screen. First image is the normal size. The second image, third image and the fourth image are zoomed images of the same area with increasing zoom factor. You can yourself notice that ZoomIt can zoom any area up to several times – by large factors (though I did not measure the actual zooming factor and there is no indication on the ZoomIt web page on this issue, my guess is that the maximum zoom would perhaps be in the range of 1000% to 2000%). Just have a look at the following images:
While detailed instructions have been given in the main window of ZoomIt itself, and I recommend that you go through those instructions, let me highlight the most important instruction which will always be handy. Once you are in the zoom mode of this utility, you can exit the zoom mode, i.e., you can return to the normal mode or to the normal screen by pressing the Escape key or by clicking the right-mouse button.
You can also annotate the normal screen or the zoomed screen with ZoomIt by drawing on it using pens of different colors provided in the utility. You can copy the zoomed and annotated screen with Ctrl + C keys and can save a copy of such screen with Ctrl + S keys.
Like all other useful utilities written by Mark Russinovich, ZoomIt is also absolutely free.
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