Tony,

Do you have a keyboard shortcut for switching between monitors? I have two monitors at work where I can drag things inbetween them. Is there a shortcut key so I don’t have to use my mouse?

Thanks!

Have you tried Ultramon? It includes keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors. It can even add buttons to the title bar (as shown above) to move windows between monitors. It also adds a taskbar to each monitor, which makes it easy to keep track of where every window is.

BTW, I’m not being paid to endorse Ultramon–I just like it.

It does other things that I don’t use, like manage multiple-monitor screensavers (good for photo slideshows) and stretching a wallpaper across multiple monitors.

Note that Laura responded to me, and it sounds like I misunderstood her situation:

Hi Tony,

It was so good of you to respond.  No, I guess what I meant was when I move from doing something on one screen to another, I have to use the mouse to click on the monitor I need to use.  Then when I go back to the other task, I have to click on the first monitor with the mouse.  If I could CTRL+ “something” or ALT or some shortcut that lets me pivot back and forth, that would be awesome.  I can’t really install anything to the hospital computer.

You’re so kind, thank you!

And my updated recommendation:

Hi, Laura. Maybe pressing Alt+Tab will work for you? That let’s you switch between active applications. I’m not sure about your setup, but if you have one window open on each monitor and you haven’t used any other apps, pressing Alt+Tab will switch between the windows (and thus the monitors).

Please do let me know if that helps!

Lifehacker offered a post about how to use your My Pictures folder as a screensaver in Windows XP. Here are the steps to do that in Vista:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.

2. Click Appearance and Personalization.

3. Under Personalization, click Change screen saver.

4. The Screen Saver Settings dialog appears. Click the Screen saver list, and then click Photos.

5. Optionally, click the Settings button to adjust the default settings, or click the Preview button to watch how it works.

6. Click OK to save your settings.

The screen saver provides a variety of different techniques for fading between pictures, and can even stack pictures on top of each other. It reminds me of Windows Photo Story. If you have multiple monitors, it’ll only show on one, unfortunately. For dual-monitor support, check out Ultramon.