I use a 2560x1440 laptop which I connect to a 27" 1080p monitor to work with. When I start the laptop disconnected, and then connect it, I get very slight blurring around everything, as if higher resolution UI elements are being scaled down to fit the new resolution. This is tolerable and I understand why it happens (though I'd prefer if it didn't). It is fixable by a quick restart.
However, what I found much more annoying is that even after a restart, some UI elements are needlessly gigantic. Here are some examples.
notepad++ - note only the tabs are oversized
SQL Server - note the app windows behind is normal sized - only dialogs are oversized
A second restart seems to fix this. It seems like I have to restart 3 or 4 times per day just to resolve these silly UI issues, and I'm sick of it. Restarting only takes a few seconds with SSD drives nowadays, but it means closing and reopening everything. Does anyone know of any workarounds or resolutions? I've even considered getting a higher res external monitor, but I'm not sure if that would make any difference
UPDATE 1 - July 29th, 2016:
I still don't have an answer for this. I've tried Mustafa's solution below with no success. There's not enough room in the comments to explain the results, so I thought I'd post them here and update the answer.
Mustafa suggests I use this tutorial and change text size in Display settings and / or in Advanced Sizing Of Text And Other Items. Neither of these had the desired effect.
External monitor scaling set to 100%:
You can see here I've selected the external monitor and the controls are now available, but already set to the smallest size, 100%
Advanced Display Settings > Advanced Sizing of Text and Other Items:
I've reduced all available options from 9 to 7 and hit apply. You can see that the tabs in Notepad++ (which I've closed and reopened) are not any smaller, but now the menus have shrunk. Likewise on SSMS (also closed and reopened) the dialog is still huge but the menus are now too small.
Side by Side comparison:
You can see the menus on the right (after the change) are much smaller but the dialog is still too big.
