XP’s successor Vista displays a thumbnail preview of programs that are open when the mouse is pointed to a minimized program in the Taskbar. This can easily be done in Windows XP too. All you need is the Visual Tooltip freeware. It creates thumbnails for the Taskbar which can be positioned as you like. The tool also replaces the Taskbar with a three dimensional Doc like Apple MAC if needed. It is available for free download on Download Here.

Installation of Visual Tool Tip:

Unzip the archive in a folder of your choice and start the ‘VisualToolTip.exe’ file. Select ‘English’ in the first dialog box and click ‘OK’. The tool appears in the system tray after you start it. Right-click it and select ‘Options’.

Configuration:

You can set the image size, background color and transparency in the ‘Thumbnails’ tab. Now switch to the ‘Display’ tab. Activate ‘Start with Windows’. By default, there is a slight delay before the animated view appears.

It opens faster when you reduce the value ‘700′ in the ‘Delay in showing thumbnail’ field or set it to ‘0′. If you want this to happen even faster, set both the combination fields ‘Thumbnail display animation’ and ‘Thumbnail close animation’ to ‘none’.

You can also pull a thumbnail at any place on the screen by dragging and dropping it. It then remains in the foreground and is updated regularly. A lengthy video conversion can be monitored with this. When you are done with using the window, you can hold the mouse pointer over it and click the pin symbol in the title.

Replacing the Taskbar:

Visual Tooltip can replace the Taskbar with a three-dimensional bar similar to the dock on Mac computers. You can set this in the ‘Dock’ tab. At least activate the ‘Put automatically all thumbnails in the dock’ and ‘Put tray icon on dock’ options. Set the rotation and transparency and test the alternative bar. If you prefer it that way, you can even turn off the Windows Taskbar by activating the "" option in the ‘Taskbar’ tab.

NOTE: If you start the tool with Windows and hide the Taskbar before the new bar is configured correctly, you will not be able to access your programs anymore. If this happens, open the Windows Explorer with [Windows] + [E], navigate to ‘VisualToolTip.exe’ and restart it. The Taskbar will be displayed with Options.

Moving too many windows opened simultaneously is very tedious. Besides, the budget is too small to procure a giant TFT. If you are short on desktop space, you have the option of virtually enlarging the monitor with Virtual Desktops. With Multiple Desktops in one Monitor, You can then group communication and Internet programs, on one desktop and office applications on the other.

The advantage here is that you need not search for the window of the mail program, for example, amongst multiple work-related windows.The ‘Virtual Desktop Manager’ from the XP PowerToys is a simple and free tool for enabling virtual desktops. The tool collection is available at the Download Here

The tool is ready-to-use immediately after installation, even if you don’t notice any changes. Simply right click anywhere in the taskbar and select ‘Toolbars > Desktop Manager’. Now you will see the ‘MSVDM’ toolbar for quick screen changes in the taskbar.

However, the displayed text does not have any function, in fact, it only wastes space. In order to get rid of it, remove the taskbar lock first by right clicking on it and selecting the ‘Lock the taskbar’ context command. Now right click on the Start bar of the toolbar and untick the ‘Show title’ option.

Clicking once on the ‘Preview’ symbol will show an overview of all the four virtual desktops. It is possible to define different background wallpapers as well as custom key combinations for quickly switching between the individual screens through the context menu of the toolbar.

You can determine through the ‘Shared Desktops’ option in the context menu whether the taskbar should display only the window of the current screen or all windows together. With the activated setting, you can fetch windows by clicking on the desktop which is active at that moment.

After arranging everything, deactivate the option such that you can view only the current desktop. Dexpot is another free utility with a larger functional scope, which can be run under all versions of Windows. You can fnd it from the website http://dexpot.de/index.php.