Visual Task Tips

Visual Task Tips brings one of the most useful and anticipated Windows Vista features to Windows XP installations. Thus, by hovering the mouse pointer over an application that sits in the taskbar of your OS, this particular program generates a thumbnail just above it position.

While Windows Vista did not revolutionize the Windows experience overall, it has provided quite a bunch of new graphical features including the Aero theme or the Flip technology. Besides those, it brought the ability of the OS to display contents of windows in a live preview or in a simple thumbnail way.

Depending on whether the window you hover on is actually minimized or in the background of the focused application, Visual Task Tips draws a mini-window depicting a cached image of the contents shown in that specific program and even animates the thumbnail in order to offer a live preview.

This comes in very handy for everyone looking for a solution every time the taskbar becomes crowded with applications you work with. It can surely improve the productivity of your day-to-day tasks and it also eliminates dead-times that may occur while bringing up a program from the taskbar just to check its state and then sending it back to its place.

Just as the Windows Vista feature it replicates, Visual Task Tips does not work with any kind of software that your taskbar accommodates, especially when handling 3D-rendered graphical applications or video players. While this is not a rule, it has its exceptions and from time to time, the program will be able to provide a working thumbnail.

Visual Task Tips has earned both positive and negative reviews over the years and being part of various Windows XP transformation packs, it still helps out XP users on a daily basis. If you find its function interesting and that you may benefit from its capabilities, then it only takes a few clicks to deploy it to your system.