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Organize open windows in Windows XP

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Looking for Windows Vista version of the article? Click here then.
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When you have several programs open, they tend to overlap and hide information you need to see.

You can use keyboard shortcut Alt+Tab to scroll through open windows (hold down Alt key and press Tab to cycle to next open window, or use Alt+Shift+Tab to cycle to previous open window). This is good for displaying only one window at a time, but sometimes it is necessary to see two or three or four or even more windows, all at the same time. The effectiveness of this depends, of course, on your screen resolution - the higher the screen resolution (for example, 1024 x 768 is higher than 800 x 600), the more information you can see. Screen resolution is always width in pixels x height in pixels.

Please note that all actions described below apply only to open windows, not minimized ones.

Cascading open windows

You can always try cascading windows first. Cascading aligns all open windows so that you can always return to any open window by clicking on its Title bar or any corner you can see.

To cascade windows, right-click on an empty area of Taskbar and click Cascade Windows on the menu:

This command aligns them like in picture below. As you can see, you can always click on any of Title bars to activate a window and bring it to front. If you click on Adobe Reader's Title bar, it will hide most of Google - Windows Internet Explorer's Title bar, but you can always click on the bottom left corner or bottom right corner of Google - Windows Internet Explorer window to activate it again.
If you don't like cascade, you can right-click on an empty area of Taskbar again and click on Undo Cascade command.

Tiling windows horizontally

To align open windows or programs horizontally, right-click on an empty Taskbar area and choose Tile Windows Horizontally:

In case you need to undo the operation, right-click on an empty Taskbar area again and choose Undo Tile.

Here are windows tiled horizontally. If you want to tile them vertically, right-click on an empty Taskbar area and choose Tile Windows Vertically:

Tiling windows vertically

Right-click on an empty Taskbar area and click on Tile Windows Vertically.

In picture below three windows are tiled vertically. You can undo the operation by right-clicking Taskbar and choosing Undo Tile.

When you have more than two windows open, the effect of tiling depends on your screen resolution. I have 800 x 600 (width in pixels x height in pixels) resolution and such small resolution makes most of windows' contents unusable.
When you have more than three windows open, it does not really matter whether you tile windows horizontally or vertically - it will look the same.

Minimizing all open windows

When you need to minimize all open program windows, you can either click the Show Desktop button on Quick Launch toolbar or right-click on an empty Taskbar area and choose Show the Desktop.

Keyboard shortcuts

When you need to cycle through open windows, hold down Alt key and press Tab key repeatedly until you find the one you need. You can also use Windows Key+D to show desktop, Windows key+M to minimize all open windows and Windows key+Shift+M to restore minimized windows.

Looking for Windows Vista version of the article? Click here then.
Looking for Windows 7 version of the article? Click here then.

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