That sounds like a small thing but you might be surprised – if you keep it in mind, you might find you’re using it constantly.Īnd there’s one more trick. Again, if you drag the window away, it returns to its original shape. For editing documents side by side, for copying information from one program to another, for cutting and pasting – this is just wildly convenient compared with manually positioning two windows. If you drag another program until the mouse cursor touches the right side of the screen, the other program expands to fill the right half of the screen.Īnd voila! Two programs side by side. If you drag a window until the mouse cursor touches the left side of the screen, the program expands to fill exactly half the screen. There’s another Snap feature, though, that’s even better. People who use two monitors should be nodding right now, thinking, yup, that’s easier than what I’ve been doing. Grab the title bar and pull it away from the top of the screen, move it to the other monitor, and move the mouse to the top of the screen so the program goes to full-screen on monitor 2. For the first time it’s possible to drag a full-screen program from one monitor to another in a single motion. That’s not all that exciting, although it adds something for people using dual monitors. Drag the title bar off the top, the window returns to a window. If you drag it until the mouse cursor touches the top of the screen, the window expands to full screen, just as if you had clicked the “Maximize” button in the upper right. The basic idea is simple: grab a window by clicking on the top title bar and drag it around.

When I first heard about Snap, it sounded like a gimmick – some visual tricks for resizing windows. I’ve been using Windows 7 on my computers for several months in the next few days, I’ll point out a couple of the new features that have proven to be surprisingly useful. It’s Windows 7 week! Engadget and Gizmodo are working overtime to keep up with new product announcements, advertisements are starting to appear, bloggers and pundits are weighing in, all leading up to the official Windows 7 launch date on Thursday October 22.

Snap in windows 7