4 tools to get the most out of your screen real estate

Monitors are getting bigger and wider and if I may add, cheaper too. And while these are great for watching high definition content, for normal usage there is just too much real estate than you can possibly use. You don’t need one single window to occupy the whole of your 22” monitor, do you? The following free tools help you to extract the maximum advantage out of your BIG monitors with efficient window management.

1. WinSplit Revolution is one of the most popular tool for widescreen monitors or any high resolution monitors for that matter. With the help of a hotkey you can move the active window to any corner or any side of the screen – top left, top right, up, bottom and so on. You can divide the screen into as many parts as you want and confine any window into any of these parts.

2. Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size. So instead of having the move the windows into predefined areas on the screen, you can resize them to the size you want and drag them anywhere. Besides resizing a window it is possible to position it as well. In the configuration box you will see a “Move To” option where you can specify the exact pixel position where you want the window moved.

 

To resize any window right-click on the right bottom corner of the window to pop up a menu with predefined sizes. You can also right click on the restore, maximize button and the title bar of the window to bring up this menu.

3. AeroSnap is a program that allows you to snap any program to the edge of the screen by dragging. Just pull a window to the right edge of the screen and it will resize to half the screen size on the right. Similarly pull a window to the left to have it resized to the left half of the screen. Pulling the window to the top will maximize it.

4. Acer GridVista is a tool from Acer that allows you to divide the screen into grids and drag a window into any of these grids to automatically resize them. It has 4 different layouts to choose from. The program also adds a few buttons adjacent to the maximize/minimize buttons on the window which you can use instead of dragging windows.

All of these tools has certain advantages and disadvantages over each other. Personally, I prefer GridVista to AeroSnap where drag-n-drop is concerned. WinSplit Revolution is great for it’s keyboard hotkeys when you need to arrange windows into predefined positions, while Sizer is good for resizing any window without snapping it into any position.