One of the headaches of working with Windows is to select a window first, bring it to focus and make it active before you can control it with your mouse e.g., scroll it up or down. Your mouse works only with the currently active window. This is a setback specially in Windows 7 which allows you to open two documents side by side (by dragging them to left and right edges of your screen). But you have to switch the focus from one document to another to scroll down or up. Fortunately a free software called Mouse Hunter allows you to control inactive windows without having to select them first.
Mouse Hunter is a freeware Windows application that can be used in all versions of Windows. It can be downloaded from the Aml Pages website. The download is an installer setup program. After installing Mouse Hunter, it places an icon in your system tray. Left-clicking on this system tray icon would toggle the Mouse Hunter on or off. Right-clicking on this icon would bring up the context menu. Double-clicking on the icon would open the Mouse Hunter settings.
Mouse Hunter configuration window, which automatically opens up after the installation and which you can open from the system tray icon as well, shows basic options like start Mouse Hunter automatically with Windows, start it disabled, record the events to a log file etc. There are options for the Mouse Hunter smart wheel as well, for example, scroll horizontally if Shift key on your keyboard is pressed (you can also choose from Ctrl, right and left arrow keys). Scrolling by pressing the middle button can be disabled altogether if you want to.
Mouse Hunter is very useful if you are one of the developers who usually keep many windows open and have to switch through them every few minutes. Using Mouse Hunter, developers can keep these windows open side-by-side and scroll through them without having to switch to them first. I personally find it very productive when using the offline MSDN library and writing a program – I do not have to switch back and forth from the Visual Studio window and the MSDN library window. It is also very useful if you are writing a review of soemthing like a book or gadget, you can scroll up and down the references in the web browser window and write in your blog at the same time.
So if you do not want to spend your valuable time in switching from one window to another just to see what it shows, then you can make use of Mouse Hunter. It is free software and works in all versions of Windows. If you are a writer, a blogger or a programmer then Mouse Hunter is indispensable for you.
You can download Mouse Hunter from http://www.amlpages.com/mousehunter.shtml.