Totally Awesome Windows Trick

While I prefer the term “particular”, some (especially my wife and all my friends) would call me “anal-retentive.” For example, I am, ahem, particular where my windows show up on the screen. I have all the applications I run set to their specific locations and nothing makes me uninstall an application faster than one which can’t remember its last location. OK, maybe I need to come to terms with the fact I am anal retentive.

As usual I was running a million applications and everything was going swimmingly. Somehow I manage to right click in the task bar and accidentally clicked the Show Windows Side by Side context menu item:

My world came crashing in on me because here’s what showed up on one of my monitors:

Ahhhhhhhhhh! My! Windows! Moved! For someone as anal-retentive as me the only response at this point was a sever hyperventilation session. I definitely did not want to spend the next hour rearranging all the windows on all my monitors again. Out of frustration I walked away from the computer (OK, I got a beer), and I sat down prepared to manually move everything back.

Thanks to the beer, I had a small brain storm: I wonder if CTRL+Z works? Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave CTRL+Z a press and all my windows moved back right back to where they originally were! I immediately raised my beer and toasted in the direction of Redmond (40 degrees magnetic from where I sit). Totally, completely and utterly awesome! I’m running Vista so I double checked this on Windows XP and it works there as well.

Some of you are thinking “yeah, duh, that’s been in Windows for a million years.” Well, I’ve been using Windows for a million years (since 1.04!) and I’ve never known this butt saving trick was there. To me, little things like this fall into “the great customer service” bucket and it’s a great example for all of us to follow. While not the greatest customer service story ever, I’m definitely happy to be using Windows right now!