Precious Screen Real Estate

Your value has not fallen like the housing market.

Jennifer Marsman retweeted a link to 50 seriously useful Windows 7 tips. I liked number 16 “recover screen space” which suggests using small icons on your taskbar.

This inspired me to dig through the new display control panel and find how to do my favorite “recover screen space” tweak, shrinking window borders.

  1. Right click on your desktop and select personalize
  2. From the bottom row, select the second item “Window Color”
  3. Click the “Advanced appearance settings…” link
  4. The 3rd item in the Item: drop down (combobox) is Active Window Border, but its size is already 1. Instead, select the 5th item “Border Padding” and reduce it to 2 or 1. I like 1.
    (This dialog should look familiar to users of Windows 3.0, it hasn’t changed much since then.)

Real Estate is always precious, especially when it is on my screen. Yes, a Border Padding of 1 is still useable on a 15.4” 148DPI display (that’s 1920×1200).