Recently I purchased a new Aleinware 17 with a 4K screen. I was wicked excited about it, but it developed problems quickly, and I returned it. My replacement model should arrive in about two weeks. I'm hoping through this thread to resolve the problems I had with DOpus 11.19 on a Windows 10, 64bit system with a 4K screen.
I copied and saved my DOpus 11.19 settings form my Windows 8.1 desktop with a non 4K monitor, then, after installing DOpus 11.19 on the Alienware, I imported those settings. Everything initially looked and worked great, with one exception. Folders that had been saved with Thumbnails as their view opened in thumbnails, but with tiny thumbnails. Thumbnail size on the Windows 8.1 system without a 4K monitor was 151. On the Alienware with 4K monitor I found that a thumbnail size between 200 and 210 worked best. However, although I tried to save these new folder settings, none would save. Likewise, when I tried to change other folder settings, such as column width, in any folder, none would save. As soon as I would switch to a new folder, all of the just saved settings would revert to the imported settings sizes.
One other setting was lost completely: Short Name. It was no longer available, it's column listings filled with the full long name. I have some programs that will not install to folders with, for instance, an & in it's name, but install normally if I substitute the short name in the installation process, so glancing at that column is handy.
Were these problems the result of my original faulty Alienware or were they a problem with DOpus trying to work with the new 4K hardware? I don't know. Until the replacement Alienware with a 4K screen arrives and I have installed a fresh copy of DOpus on it, I won't know. Have others had these problems?
Directory Opus 11 does not have full high DPI support. It was one of the major additions to Opus 12.
That said, you can configure Opus 11 to work fairly well in high DPI modes, but it won't be completely perfect in the older version and will take some extra configuration and tweaking, while things are pretty much automatic in the newer Opus 12. In Opus 11, you'll need to re-configure things for each machine independently if you transfer your config from a machine with one DPI to one with another. In Opus 12, you can transfer the config and Opus will automatically translate settings between DPIs. (e.g. If the thumbnail size is set to 256 on a standard 100% scaling machine, importing that config to a 200% scaling machine will automatically set the thumbnail size to 512.)
High DPI support is covered right at the start of the Opus 12 "What's New" video, if you're interested in those improvements:
Default thumbnail size is set under Preferences / File Display Modes / Thumbnails.
If you want it to be larger than 256x256 in Opus 11, you'll also need to adjust Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced: max_thumbnail_size. (In Opus 12, max_thumbnail_size automatically scales with the system DPI, so you would not normally need to adjust it, unless you wanted enormous thumbnails. Note that the larger it is, the more memory and disk space thumbnails use.)
That's unlikely to be due to 4k.
See Folder Formats: Quick Guide for a quick step-by-step on how to save new default folder formats for all folders.
If you want to specify fixed widths, make sure the auto-size columns option is not turned on on the format's Display tab.
FWIW, Opus 12 has some improvements to the way default formats are saved and also the way column sizing is specified, so that the auto-sizing settings are visible from the list of columns, as this confused quite a few people in the past. But you can achieve the same results in Opus 11 as well. (Opus 12 has some new column sizing options for different types of auto-sizing, which are shown here if you are interested: Directory Opus 12: Resizing File Display Columns, and Folder Formats.)
Short names are most likely turned off on the drive you are looking at. If the drive has them turned off, they don't exist and cannot be used to work around problems in software that requires them.
Windows 10 now defaults to turning off short names on drives it creates. They'll still be enabled on drives that already had them enabled, but they have to be turned on explicitly on new drives (or newly formatted drives). Microsoft have finally killed them, at least as a default setting, despite a lot of software (unfortunately) still needing them to work around poor programming. (Also despite them being useful to work around path-length limits which are still in parts of the Windows APIs themselves.)
The Short Name column in Opus displays what the OS and filesystem return when Opus asks Windows for the short names. If short names are turned off for a drive then you usually get back either nothing or the original long name in upper case.
Thanks for your very detailed replay Leo. I very much appreciate your time.
After reading it, I checked my program cache folder on this 8.1 Desktop machine and found that I had downloaded the Directory Opus 12.3 Install file in mid March, which is about the time I received my Alienware laptop. I haven't installed 12 on this desktop, but I do recall installing it on the Alienware laptop, wanting to give the new laptop the most up to date program installs. Some of the problems I encountered may have been due to the problems the Aleinware machine was having. In the effort to fix the laptop, I worked with Alienware tech support daily for a week, installing new drivers and trying new settings. In the final attempt they had me reinstall Windows, reformatting my system drive in the process. The whole system worked worse after that, which is why I returned it and which is why I don't know what was causing my DOpus problems — DOpus or Alienware.
I will look at the links in your reply later this morning, but they seem right on point. I should probably upgrade DOpus on this 8.1 machine and explore how version 12 works on it while I wait for the new Alienware to get here, in particular the new Directory Opus 12 Resizing File Display Columns, and Folder Formats options.
I had gone so far as to read the size of the columns I had expanded to in the Alienware DOpus window and copied those numbers into new folder column settings, but nothing was saveable. I'll read the links you've suggested and also, once I've installed DOpus 12 on this machine, backup my settings from 12 and import them to the new Alienware, rather than my old 11.19 saved settings as before.
I found your reply about the Windows change to Short Name switch curious. I never knew the switch existed. I guess the days of DOS are truly fading, except in the Power Shell.
