Fix The ‘Cursor Drift’ Annoyance On Dual Monitors


Multiple monitors are great for productivity, but it makes it harder to do a few things. Since your cursor can so easily “drift” to the next monitor, it’s hard to hit the close button on maximised windows, or “snap” them to the side of the screen. Redditor trebor89 has a simple solution: Make your left monitor slightly higher than the right one in Windows’ preferences.

To do this, just right-click the desktop and go to “Screen Resolution”. Move the left monitor up just a few pixels. and you should notice that everything looks the same, but there’s now a tiny little “wall” in the top-right and bottom-right corners of your left monitor. This allows you to:

  • Close a maximised window on the left monitor without your cursor drifting over.
  • Snap a window to the right half of your left monitor by dragging it to the top-right corner. This also works for the left side of your right monitor, if you drag the window to the bottom left corner.
  • More easily show the desktop from the taskbar without your cursor drifting over to the right monitor (provided your taskbar is on the left monitor and not the right).

As trebor89 mentions, some of these are solved by keyboard shortcuts — like Ctrl+W for close window and Win+Right/Win+Left for Aero Snap — but if you’re just used to the mouse actions, this can fix the annoyance of multiple monitors easily. Hit the link to read more.

LPT: Dual monitors? Set the left-most one slightly higher to prevent “slipping” onto the other screen when looking for the close button. [Reddit]


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