Being a master of multitasking on Windows is an easy task once get a good grasp of its features and how to handle multiple windows. A good, high-resolution monitor these days isn’t very expensive. Some of us even use our Full HD and 4K TVs as monitors and that’s fine. High resolution displays are known for their amazing pixel count and how they offer a great movie and TV watching experience, but the truth is that they do better things like helping you multitask. Plug in your TV to your laptop or PC and we’ll show you how.
Windows in our operating system span a range of pixels. When you have more pixels like you do on a 4K or Full HD monitor, you can run more windows in that same screen size. This is why a full HD or 4K monitor or TV makes much better sense than the usual 1366 x 768 screen. A 4K TV for example, can run four 1920 x 1080 screens at once. Compare that with your laptop. That’s part of the benefit, but it also comes with some confusion – managing the several windows on the screen. It’s easier to just run one window at once, but that also means you’re constantly alt-tabbing between them. This wastes time, and it’s stressful on your fingers and wrist when you are doing that a few hundred times a day. The solution is a feature within PowerToys called FancyZones. It’s a free application by Microsoft and you can download it from https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys.
There is one more thing we need to do before we get started. Windows sets up most laptops and PCs running high resolution displays to use larger fonts and window scaling. This forces windows and text to appear larger despite having a higher resolution. A higher resolution screen renders smaller text, menus and buttons but this is counter-productive when you are trying to run more windows at once. You can disable this by going to Settings > Display. The scaling might be set to 150 per cent or higher in some cases. Turn this down to 100 per cent. You should notice a major difference in the way your screen looks. More resolution means, you can have larger spreadsheets that don’t need scrolling, more text on a single page at once, more windows and less switching between them. It might take you a while to get used to the smaller text, but you can tweak it to 125 per cent if it helps.
The idea behind FancyZones is being able to drag and drop windows to different areas of the screen and FancyZones takes care of the alignment and fitting. You can preconfigure these spaces for windows, to your liking. Take for example, a chat software does not need a lot of space, so you can configure a small window it, preferably at the bottom. If you use a software for spreadsheets and say an e-mail client, those can be setup one above the other so they’re easily accessible. You could even assign a space for a small music player since you don’t need that software to cover the entire screen. Fancyzones lets you do this.
Once you have PowerToys installed, run it. You can choose to disable features that you don’t wish to use. Those are quite interesting too and we might cover them at a later point. Click the FancyZones tab and then on Edit zones. You should see presets of layouts available there. You can choose to increase the number of spaces by entering it at the bottom. Uncheck the ‘Show space around zones’ option. Pay attention to the layout you have chosen. Click on Apply when you’re ready.
Simply hold down the Shift key and drag the window of your choice into the space of your choice, and it will be resized to it. Coloured blocks should guide you as you drag windows into them. You can follow these steps to move other windows into those spaces. You can also customize the layout, by either adding more spaces or rearranging them. Go back to PowerToys and the FancyZones section. Select the layout that best suits your needs or click on the custom option. You can access the editor using the Win + ` shortcut key.
Once you’re happy with the layout, you can use Shift and drag and drop the window into the space of your choice. Using shortcuts is also possible. Simply press Win + Left/Right keys to toggle between the spaces and the window should jump between them. There are also settings meant to automatically load specific software into their slots.
You can choose to make multiple layouts as well. This is useful if you’re working on different kinds of tasks. You can simultaneously switch between them using a simple shortcut. For example, you could switch between created layouts meant for say, graphics designing that uses large spaces for the tools you need, and you could switch to one in moments that’s better designed for media consumption with a wide video space, and smaller spaces for other browsing and chatting software.
These are just some of the important features of PowerToys and FancyZones. The software package is being constantly developed so features roll out every few weeks. One of the latest updates allows PowerToys to be updated automatically. We hope you give it a try. If you’re in the market for a new monitor or a TV, do check out RelianceDigital.in for the best offerings.
