You have a high-resolution screen. Studio is not really designed for such screens. If you cannot live with small buttons (not a big deal, if you ask me), use the settings in Windows to magnify the view. You might also want to check this app: Change Scaling Behaviour - Language Solutions | SDL

Thanks, Jerzy, for your prompt response. For your information, I am using Windows 10 and my laptop is indeed one of the newer ones with the 11th generation version of i7. So, as a result, I did not seem to find many of the things mentioned in the steps outlined in the Article referenced in your message. I am not too sure why the latest version of SDL would not be addressing these problems associated with installing SDL Professional in newer versions of laptops. This is a bit disappointing to me considering just how expensive this version of SDL Studio is. I really find it very difficult to believe that this will be the reason for my problem with this software in this day and age. I hope someone from SDL will come forward and prove this wrong.

Thank you Paul for your patient and detailed explanation. I just received an update that has aggravated the situation even worse. Now I have giant padlock icons :D

Update: I switched to 125% scaling. It feels better now. Thank you. 
But I am going to upgrade my hardware anyway. Could you (or anybody else) please suggest a good PC monitor 22" to 25" that fits Studio best? A monitor that I can just plug and play smoothly. A monitor that you know for sure that it works fine for Studio with default settings (100% scaling). Any idea?

I am using 2 ASUS 27" screens. Here are some screenshots to show how Studio looks like there

This is quite small still, in my opinion. Let us hope SDL/RWS treats this with some urgency. One can glean

from this just how widespread this problem could be among those using newer screen resolutions.

Please take into account, that the screens are 27". And TBH I do not need all the menu item to be in big font, I know them all good enough.

Thank you Jerzy for your suggestion. This actually means that even screen size won't change anything. Be it 22" or 27", still wasting a huge amount of space even in the header area where the active project name is displayed. Little SDL_Trados_Studio_ProjectName with 3x wider empty space below it...

Incredible. 83% of waste space. Never thought of that before until I painted it.

I will not argue, that this could be optimized. But OTOH I have so many other construction sites of bigger importance in my life, so I do not really care about this yellow places. You could fill it with letters or flowers, I really do not care. What I need are the analysis results, and these are much better usable in an exported Excel file. You can also quite clearly read these in the files or projects view. What I really do care about ist the Editor view, where my working elements are nicely scaled to a size I can comfortably read both at home on two 27" monitors or underway with my MS Surface—one 12" screen or, when not on the road, plus another 13" UHD screen. I work in Editor, all other views are just for special purpose, so I do not pay so much attention and do not lose my temper on those.

Stepan Konev

Stepan Konev said:

Incredible. 83% of waste space. Never thought of that before until I painted it.

Perhaps you can put your design skills to good use and try this application?

https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/w/customer-experience/5519/reports-viewer-plus

This app has many advantages over the out of the box reports view, one of them is that you can create your own reports.  You do need a little knowledge around stylesheets and XSLT, but armed with that you would be able to create reports that looked exactly as you liked them!

But the Editor view is just the same. Half bar is empty with microscopic captions that you have to 'know them all good enough' by heart.

Are you serious? Do you really think I am talking about the Report view only? I mention it just because it is much more representative. However, the same applies to any other view in Studio. If I was wrong, why this is not only me who is asking these questions for years.

If you would put as much effort in learning how to adapt Studio GUI, you certainly would have noticed, that you can change the proportions of window parts in Editor. But as I see here, you have plenty of time for playing. This said I return to work I have to do, as any further discussion of the obvious makes no sense for me.

If you would put as much effort in learning how to adapt Studio GUI, you certainly would have noticed, that you can change the proportions of window parts in Editor. But as I see here, you have plenty of time for playing. This said I return to work I have to do, as any further discussion of the obvious makes no sense for me.

Ok, gentlemen, you win. Everything is fine with Trados.