Actual Window Guard

Are you tired of seeing the same boring Word icon in your taskbar? Would you rather pop-up windows in your Web browser always opened in the upper-right corner of your screen? In short, are you a windows control freak? If so, Actual Window Guard was designed for you.

Actual Window Guard lets you determine how your windows behave when you open or shut down programs or files. For example, you could set Windows Explorer to always open in the upper-right of your screen, force the window to display on top, and set a dialog box to ask for confirmation every time you close the window. You can also set priorities to determine how much CPU time each open application uses.

The interface is not intuitive, and the Getting Started section in Help applies to all Actual Tools programs. There's no useful overview. I used trial and error to figure out how to select windows (choose Windows, Add New Rule), add settings (click the icons arrayed at the top of the interface), and save the settings (select File, Save for your preferences to take effect). In addition to tweaking individual windows, you can apply application-wide settings to Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, Opera, the Windows Task Manager, and something called Tablet PC Input Panel.

Actual Window Guard does work as advertised--but is it worth $30? Fortunately, you've got 60 days to try it out before buying. If you're control-freak enough to find it useful, you may want to look at Actual Tools' other programs as well: Actual Window Minimizer and Actual Window Manager.

--Kim Saccio-Kent