Screen magnifiers for Windows, any recommendations?

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First: It is not MY decision to use Windows but the one of my college. I normally would just say eff it and go with the Desktop Environment and screen resolution of my choice, but do not have the rights to change that. The admins cannot/do not want to do that either.

I am visually impaired but go to a regular and tiny college. I am apparently the first seriously visually impaired student there ever. My problem is that in various programming subjects where I until now scraped by with only my wits, my text mode editor for Linux and a command line compiler, the use of a real IDE becomes more and more of a neccessity. The inbuilt completion is faster than checking with the API in a browser and especially during exams, fast is good.

I thus looked into the area of programs which magnify the screen under Windows, but all programs so far were a disappointment: changing Windows and tooltips did not reliably work, the projected pposition of the mouse pointer had nothing to do with where it really was and so on...

Are there any good programs which do not require installation and which I can run as user? Don't tell me that GIYF, I tried Google, but the homepages of the programs never tell how much the programs fail. I want to know whether you used one and can recommend it.

I had a mouse that came with an extra button and drivers that allowed that extra button to magnify the screen. I know its not just a program you can download, but it worked beautifully

Foo, this would most likely require admin privileges, but still: Did it work reliably? Did it occasionally move windows above the magnification? Crash? Not show tooltips? Display a wrong mouse position?

What model was it? How much did it cost? Where did you get it from?

I can't remember the model, but it was made by microsoft, it cost me about $35 and I got it from Wal-Mart.
It worked quite reliably, never crashed, never displayed the wrong mouse position.
The way it worked was, I'd hit the button, and a large square would appear on the screen, the contents of the square being a magnified version of the area my mouse cursor was over, the magnified box would move as I moved the mouse cursor. The only drawback was that it didn't allow you to adjust how much it magnified the screen. I found it to be perticularly useful when I had my computer hooked up to a rather large HDTV and I had the resolution at 1080x1920. A lot of text appeared rather small on the screen from where I was sitting and that mouse was the only thing I had that made that resolution doable.

Oh, one other drawback(imo) was that the mouse wheel was a tad too sensitive for gaming. Although, I imagine there is a way to change that, I just never really got around to it.

Speak to the college and see what they can do for you...

I did. The answer seems to be that if it is too far away from 'nothing' the college can't help. As I said. so far they never had that issue.

I've seen glasses designed for using computers that magnify things and a lot of other things, but they cost about 100 usd's

What do you mean by glasses? In this context it is ambiguous. I wear glasses but this only helps me so far.

My vision is also not perfect, but not as bad as yours by the sound of it. The one quick thing I've done with computers is to lower the screen resolution settings. This has usually been adequate to meet my needs. With browsers such as Firefox I have the minimum text size set large enough to comfortably browse web sites. Unfortunately not all web sites are designed with the vision impaired in mind and some big companies have web sites that don't behave when resized and are virtually unusable to me! WP works well when re-sized.

I lack the permissions to change the screen resolution and the problem is not only the text but the entire User Interface. I will need to use Eclipse and an MS Program for .Net (not MY choice, I KNOW how fail it is) during the exams...

Does this program helps? I haven't use it myself but SysInternals' stuff usually doesn't require install. What about Windows' Accessibility tools, there's a Magnifier too.

During an update on my old XP computer I got a message saying the monitor wasn't at its normal resolution. I'd purposely set it to low resolution but decided to try the Microsoft way and allowed it to set the default screen resolution to high again then answered a usability questionnaire and allowed the MS tools to configure the usability features including the magnifier. Frankly they were complete rubbish. They didn't help me at all - more of a hindrance. In the end I had to manually set everything back the way it was which was a pain. The only satisfactory solution (for me anyway) is to have the screen resolution low enough so everything is larger. Unfortunately this is not an acceptable solution for the OP.

Two suggestions:

1. Can you convince the college to have one computer screen set to low resolution? In the UK they would be required by law (disability discrimination) to do everything reasonable to accommodate your needs. I don't know if there is any similar law where you are?

2. Can you take in a laptop computer of your own to work on? Maybe with permissions to use it on the college network?

Just another thought, use VNC and scale up the viewer. I know UltraVNC can do this.

After a little more thought about this, I don't think group policy can disable resolution change, it just disable the control panel. So you could probably use setres to change resolution from the command prompt.

I do this for most stuff but the exams of course require me to use the school computers. Everything requiring Windows can't be done from my laptop since she runs Kubuntu and her predecessor damn small linux.

Thank you so much! This works beautifully! If I can use that during the exams, I won't have the expected issues and will be able to 'compete without disadvantage'