Windows Vista Annoyances

Windows Flip (Alt+Tab)

In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective. In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing your windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them.

These days, however, managing all the open windows in all your open programs can be like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your taskbar buttons, trying to find the window you want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or eject a disk. You’ll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the “deck.”

In Windows Vista, the same window-shuffling tricks are available that were available in previous editions:

• ▸ Use the Taskbar. Clicking a button on the taskbar (Section 3.9) makes the corresponding program pop to the front, along with any of its floating toolbars, palettes, and so on.

• ▸ Click the window. You can also bring any window forward by clicking any visible part of it.

• ▸ Alt+Tab. For years, this keyboard shortcut has offered a quick way to bring a different window to the front without using the mouse. If you press Tab while holding down the Alt key, a floating palette displays the icons of all running programs, as shown at the top in Figure 3-15. Each time you press Tab again (still keeping the Alt key down), you highlight the next icon; when you release the keys, ...