One upon a time we were all saddled with computer monitors that displayed 640 x 480 pixels at a time or less. At that point, it made a lot of sense to run most applications in full screen mode. But in an age of 1440 x 900px widescreen displays and dual monitor setups, it's not hard to have several different programs open simultaneously without getting in the way of one another.

The problem is that you generally need to resize each window manually to make it fit, because Windows applications usually have maximize and minimize buttons, not "put in the upper right hand corner of the screen and take up 25% of my screen real estate" buttons.

MaxTo is a tiny (169KB) utility that makes things a whole lot easier by letting you split up your display into different regions. When you first run the application, you can create as many regions as you like on any display connected to your computer by splitting your screen horizontally or vertically. You can also drag the lines splitting your screen .

Then, as long as the program is running, you can click the maximize button in almost any application and it will maximize to the region where it's hanging out, rather than taking up all the space on your monitor. For example, if you split your screen into a left and right section, if you drag a window to the right and then click maximize, it will only take up the right half of your screen.

[via Freeware Genius]