How do I make Everything Bigger?

you can change the screen resolution. that's done in system preferences->displays. however that will have an adverse affect on image quality. you can also use zoom (control+scroll with the mouse wheel) but that has an adverse affect on the image quality too. that's pretty much all you can do for now.
Supposedly Snow leopard will bring full support for resolution independence which will let you scale everything on the screen without loosing image quality.

Two options.
If you all need the items on the screen bigger, you can lower the resolution using the Displays System Preference. Each user account can set the resolution to their liking.
If you just need to zoom in to see details a bit better, you can use the Universal Access System Preference Zoom feature to zoom into the screen. You turn it on in System Prefs, and then use cmd opt= to zoom in and cmd opt- to zoom out.

I'm surprised nobody suggested increasing font size! In Mail or Safari, press command-+. You can also set the preferred font and font size in the preferences of either. Many other apps will provide something similar.

Commonman wrote:
We just bought a brand new iMac. It's the one with the big screen. It just seems like we are not using the screen to it's full capacity since everything still looks very small. For example, this box in which I'm writing only takes up a small portion of the screen.

You can make most windows bigger by dragging the lower-right corner.

In many cases, you can click the green circle in the upper-left, but the exact size that will make varies from app to app.

And I feel like I have to strain to see the writing.

How do I make everything bigger?

Many apps have Font settings you can change, usually in the Preferences section under the app's main menu (ie, click Safari, then Preferences).

And the +Tinker Tool+ app, a freebie from http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys.html
will let you change fonts for a number of places, among many other things.

Aloha, Commonman.

In addition to the suggestions provided by others, there are few more options:

When you're looking at your Desktop -- Finder View -- go to the toolbar at the top/left and pull down your "View" menu and select "View Options." Then, you'll see a dialog box.

You'll notice that you can expand the size of the icons using the slider bar on top (as big as 128 X 128, which is VERY BIG), and in that same dialog box you can increase the size of the fonts by using the appropriately named pulldown menu bar.

You can make similar adjustments for viewing ALL your folders (or you can make individual folders view adjustments). Open your Home folder, and again pull down "View" menu, and again using "View Options", you can set the defaults so that the views and font settings (and other) of ALL your folders will be similarly formatted (or assign different settings to individual folders' views). You'll see that when you use "View Options" in your Home folder, you'll have several additional options than what you saw when you opened it from your Desktop.

Also, as some of the other writers have acknowledged, adjusting the display resolution is an option. BUT, personally, the degradation of the image quality just isn't worth it.

In fact, if you make the adjustments in View Options, AND to font sizes in the preferences of your frequently used applications, PLUS, allow yourself a little bit of time to adjust to the larger workspace of the 24 inch display, I think you'll find that this combination should do the trick.

Prior to getting my 24 inch iMac, I had previously used two displays. It took me a few weeks to get used to the iMac's large display. Now, with the display settings at 1920 X 1200, icon settings at 48 x 48 and font size at 13 for my Finder View Options, and application preferences appropriately sized, I would not go back... 🙂

By the way, Onyx, a system utility freeware, is also an alternative option to Tinker Tool. However, Onyx is not for the faint of heart, and users should be very careful to read the instructions the developers provide. On the other hand, it's a very powerful utility that can help you make a lot of adjustments, and perform maintenance that you'd ordinarily have to go through Terminal to make.
Onyx can be downloaded at: http://www.titanium.free.fr/

Please let us know if this helps.

Best Regards,

HJ