Acer GridVista

Frank, one of gHacks’ readers let me know about a great little tool called Acer Vista Grid that he discovered recently. Lets see what he had to say about it first:

…a freeware program I recently came across that I quite enjoy is Acer GridVista.  It allows you to split a monitor into multiple sections.  For example, I have my 17" split into two.  In one virtual pane I have the dissertation open on which I am working, and in the other I have the code or information that is relevant to the section I am writing.  It makes it easy to keep all your open windows tidy.  It is not as cool as actually having two monitors, but it would be especially useful if you had a 22" or larger.  If only I could afford it....

I tried it out and it really is extremely useful!

I’m getting pretty used to freeware extensions being pretty buggy, however this is rock solid and you shouldn’t find any issues whatsoever. It’s easy to use, works great and even looks okay, in fact it adds a couple extra buttons to the windows as you can see in the screenshot below:

Once you have installed Acer Gridvista on your Windows system you will notice that it adds three new icons to every window of the operating system.

The first thing you may want to do however is to right-click the system tray icon and configure the grid layout of it. You can for instance divide the screen into two vertical, quad or triple parts with triple being interested as it assigns half to a primary window and the two other parts to the remaining half of the screen horizontally.

Once done you can use the buttons on the title bar of the window to lock the window to a specific part of the screen. Doing so will automatically resize the window to fit that part.

Other options available are to set a window to be always on top on the screen, and to make it transparent.

While the program may have lost some appeal for Windows 7 users, as it is possible to split windows vertically easily on the system, it can still have its uses considering that it offers additional layouts, the pin to top and transparent feature.

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