Ive installed the program but reallyl need a magnifying glass to see the tiny icons in the menu bar. I have a three year old laptop with pretty good screen resolution but nothing startling. What does Inkscape prefer please

Inkscape does not "prefer" anything.

However the current stable branch (0.92.x) does not properly scale for displays with high pixel-density yet, which should be resolved in the upcoming Inscape 1.0, though. Feel free to test a development build.

Alternatively you can override the DPI-scaling behavior (see compatibility tab in inkscape.exe's context menu). If you set it to "System" it should be scaled up (although in a blurry way).

Welcome to the forum!

You can change the size of the icons in Edit menu > Preferences > Interface.  Often a restart of Inkscape (all instances of Inkscape which might be open) seems to be needed to make the change take effect.  And I have heard reports that restarting the computer is sometimes needed.

thanks brynn - it finaly worked after I restarted and shut down and restarted a few times , it finally got the message LOL