One of the snazziest things Windows Vista adds to the GUI interface is Live Taskbar Thumbnails; graphical snapshot previews of closed windows laying on your taskbar. For anyone that has many windows open all the time, sometimes finding the window you want when you want it takes a little time. With Vista, all you have to do is hover your mouse over a closed window on the taskbar and *POP!* up comes a thumbnail preview of the sucker. It’s a timesaver (a few seconds but hey they add up), it’s functional and better yet, it’s *shudder* COOL!

If you’re using Windows XP (and most of you out there are) and are saddened that you don’t have this cool feature, worry not. Now you do with a tiny little utility called Visual Task Tips. I’m pretty much known for using tiny apps to do great things and this sucker passes my functionality/size test. Small but wonderous, time saving and cool-looking. Win-win-win! Aaaa-rooooogaaaa!!!

If you want to add the same functionality (thumbnail previews) when surfing the web, you can use Firefox, Seamonkey or Opera. These tabbed browsers (available on many operating systems) offer preview snapshots of web pages when you hover your mouse over a tab.

Both Visual Task Tips and these browsers go great together. I use VTT and Seamonkey myself and no matter what I’m looking for (a web site or a minimized window) all I have to do is hover my mouse over the sucker in question and pop goes the wease–er– snapshot.

Oh, and if you’re a thumbnail preview maniac, replace your crummy, boring XP ALT-TAB with TaskSwitch XP Pro 2.0 like I did and you too can be the cool geek on your block… (if there is such a thing.)