I recently was a co-panelist on a webinar and I had four different items I needed to have in my view on my monitors. These included my e-mail to receive questions from the attendees, the browser showing the actual program being broadcast, our joint notes on who was doing what portion and the actual PowerPoint so I could see the upcoming slides. Four items to view on only two monitors! Well, I could have printed part out or manually resized the windows to split the monitors. But that wouldn't make for a good blog post.

The week before I had been at ABA TECHSHOW where I presented a program called Getting the Most from Windows 7 with Ivan Hemmans. Since I use a Windows 7 machine, handling this was a Snap–literally. This is because Windows 7 has a feature called Snap. You can snap a window to half the screen size simply by dragging it to the left or right of the screen. But the dragging method doesn't work as easily with dual monitors. The best way is to use the keybpard shortcut, which is holding down the Windows key while tapping on the right or left arrow key. So I grabbed one screen, held the Windows key and tapped the right arrow. Grabbed Outlook and did the same but used the left arrow. Then repeated on the other monitor. (Tapping the arrow repeatedly allows one to toggle between half-screen right, half-screen left or full screen view.)

In just a few seconds I had the equivalent of four almost equal sized monitors with the four items I needed to see. Features like this are why you need to consider getting a new computer with Windows 7.