Fade out everything but the active window
Jedi Concentrate is a very useful application that fades out every part of the screen that does not belong to the active window.
You can download it from the great website an app a day. The application is open source and uses only 44 Kb unpacked. All you need to do is unpack the application to any place on your hard drive and run it from there.
Once Jedi Concentrate has been started you see its icon in the system tray.
To activate the feature you simply press F12 and everything fades to a dark color except the active window which stays the same. This means that you may need to click on the window that you want to remain in the foreground before you activate the program's feature.
Ghoster is a similar freeware application that dims all windows except the active one.
Update: It is sometimes surprising how well applications have been designed and created. Jedi Concentrate, despite not having been updated for six years, is still working as intended. I have tested the program on a 64-bit version of Windows 7, and it worked exactly as advertised.
You may also want to check some of the suggestions displayed in the comments on the author's website, as you may find updated version links there which add features such as opacity control to the program which you may miss in the original version.
The Ghoster extension on the other hand comes with an ini file that you can edit to change some of the program's settings.
;Ghoster.ini
;backcolor=000000-FFFFFF or leave blank to speed up screen redraw.
;image= Path to image or leave blank to speed up screen redraw.
;x=any number or blank Moves the image to the right.
;y=any number or blank Moves the image down.
;width=any number or blank Makes the image wider.
;height=any number or blank Makes the image taller.
;stretchwidth=1 or 0 Makes the image fill the width of the screen.
;stretchheight=1 or 0 Makes the image fill the height of the screen.
;keepaspect=1 Keeps the image from distorting.
;transparency=0-255 Makes the ghosting more or less translucent.
;jump=1 or 0 Makes the active window show through the ghosting.
;showdesktop=1 or 0 Removes the ghosting when the desktop is active.
;showontop=1 or 0 Removes ghosting from ontop windows like the taskbar.
;multimon=1 or 0 Dim all monitors in a multimonitor system
Just modify the settings in the ini file, save the changed file afterwards and the new settings will become available automatically. I suggest you create a backup of the original file first so that you can restore the initial preferences if something goes wrong during the editing process.
Unfortunately, Ghoster nor Zorro doesn’t seem to work on multimonitors anymore in Windows 8.1.
Both only affect the primary display.
TO WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN, I HAVE A NEW DELL7 COMPUTER. THE WNDOW ON MY COMPUTER FADE OUT AT TIME AND AWHILE. WHY? GOD BLESS, PAT
Try Zorro 1.5
Description
Zorro is a utility to completely blank the screen except for a rectangular area selected by the user. This is especially useful for watching videos on your computer without being distracted by other programs.
http://www.gabrieleponti.com/software/#zorro