I’ve been running Windows 7 as my main OS for quite some time now.  Ever since I installed it, there was no going back to any previous version of Windows because of its new features.  I must admit that I had been a Windows Vista user since it’s Beta days too but the reason I used Vista over XP was more about the way it looked rather than having any killer new features.  Windows 7 on the other hand does have killer features and it runs better than Vista on machines of the same spec!

I am going to write some short articles about some of these features in Windows 7 and how they help me in my everyday computing life.  Number 1 in my “Features I Cannot Live Without” is going to be Aero Snap.

Here is a brief description of Aero Snap tacking from the Wikipedia article which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Snap

Clicking and dragging a window to the right or left side of the desktop causes the window to fill the respective half of the screen. Snapping a window to the top of the desktop maximizes it. Resizing a window to touch the top or bottom edge of the screen maximizes the window to full height, whilst retaining its width; these windows will then slide horizontally if moved by the title bar, or can be pulled off, which returns the window to its original height.

Here is the sort of thing you can easily do using Aero Snap.

There’s no fiddling around trying to align windows side by side.  It’s simples!

To do this I could have either dragged one window to the left and one to the right or to achieve the same result, I could select a window and hit [WINDOWS KEY] + [LEFT ARROW] for the left window and [WINDOWS KEY] + [RIGHT ARROW] on the for the right window to be placed as shown.

Using the Windows key and directional (cursor) arrow is the best method if using more than one screen.  If you have a setup as I do with another monitor to your left, you cannot drag a window to the left hand side to “snap”.  It will just continue onto the monitor to the left until it reaches the far left of the screen.

I have noticed that a third party developer has released (in Beta) some software that mimics the Windows 7 Aero Snap feature.  I have not tested this as I do not have a test machine running Windows XP or Vista at this time but if you’d like to give it a go, you can download it for free from here: http://www.aerosnap.de/eng/download.htm I’d love to hear your comments about this download in XP or Vista, especially if you have used Aero Snap on Windows 7.

If you have any comments or questions, please go ahead – I’ll be listening.

Next up on my “Features I Cannot Live Without” will be Jump Lists – they’re very cool indeed!