How to split your laptop or PC screen/monitor in Windows XP

Posted on September 8, 2007 at 10:07 am

Here’s a quick how-to for anyone who wants to split their computer screen monitor into two so that they can view two applications side-by-side. I’ll also be talking about how you can split your screen across dual monitors and split your wallpapers so you can have a different wallpaper on each monitor.

The first how-to is really only useful if you have a widescreen computer display. Otherwise, splitting a normal monitor will not leave enough real estate for the two applications. However, if you have a 15", 17" or higher widescreen display, you can easily split the single monitor. And the best part for splitting on one monitor is that you don’t need any software application, you can do it for free using the built-in options in Windows.

So in order to split your display down the middle either horizontally or vertically, first open two applications, let’s say Word and Excel. Now click on one of the tabs in the Windows Taskbar and then press and hold the CNTRL key on your keyboard. While holding down the CNTRL key, click on the other tab in the Taskbar. They should both be selected now (they should have a darker background than the other tabs).

Now that both applications are selected in the Taskbar, right-click on either one and choose Tile Vertically from the options.

And viola! You should now have Word on one side of the screen and Excel on the other side! If you want them in landscape view rather than portrait view, just choose Tile Horizontally.

You can also split your screen three ways or more by simply selecting more applications in the Taskbar! Pretty easy! So that’s what is involved to split your screen if you have one monitor.

If you have more than one monitor, you can follow the same procedure as shown above for each monitor. That way, you would have four applications split across two monitors. Now if you’re kind of lazy like me and you would rather simply just click a button to split your screen, then you can buy a cool little program called SplitView for $29.

SplitView basically makes a GUI interface for this built-in Windows feature by adding buttons to each window that you have open to move it to the left or to the right.

You click the left arrow and that program gets split to the left and same for the arrow to the right. You can also configure keyboard shortcuts to make it even easier.

Probably only worth the $29 if you really split applications all the time at your office or at home. Otherwise, just select and right-click on the tabs! Any questions, post a comment!

Technorati Tags: split monitor, split widescreen monitor, split single monitor

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2 Responses to “How to split your laptop or PC screen/monitor in Windows XP”

GARZ said on : May 11th, 2008 at 6:46 am

is there a single click method of getting out of split screen mode?

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[...] How to split your laptop or PC screen/monitor in Windows XP… Now you can sleep with your wife and your laptop! Copyright 2007 Online Tech Tips. Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (66.150.96.109) ). Bookmark, Share or Email this article. [...]
September 8th, 2007 at 6:06 pm