When I attended a Mac OS X basic class, the teacher introduced a very neat feature called Hot Corners.

Hot Corners is a feature where an action will be performed when you move your mouse to any of the 4 corners of your screen. At first I didn’t know what so great about it but the teacher explained further… Activating screen saver to lock your computer is so much faster with Hot Corners. Another example is, let’s say you are viewing some websites that you don’t want other people to know. When you notice someone is standing behind you or walk pass you, you can immediately move your mouse to a corner to show your Desktop and hide the rest of the programs.

That’s when I realize that this Hot Corners feature in Mac OS X is a gem. When I got back to Windows, unfortunately there is no such feature. I wonder why not Microsoft go ahead and integrate this handy feature in Windows when they’ve already copied quite a few feature from Apple’s Mac OS?

Windows users now can get a feel of Hot Corners feature by installing this free tool which I am about to show you.

I found a few free utility which uses the same name that is able to provide Hot Corners feature but of course I only recommend the best. After comparing all of the Hot Corners utility I found, the best one is also called Hot Corners made by Lekrem Yelsew. In my opinion, the name of this tool is too general and the author should named it something else to avoid confusion because I’ve found 3 Hot Corners utility named Hot Corners!

Hot Corners is an easy to use, handy program launching tool for Windows. It allows you to assign different functions to the four screen corners, for example launching your screensaver or making a Google search.

By touching any corners of your screen you can launch the action that you have defined. Another special but strange added feature in Hot Corners utility called Mouse Move is that you can hit Win+X, your mouse will automatically move into the center of the screen, then move your mouse up, down, left, or right and the action you selected will be launched. So with Hot Corners utility, you can actually have 8 actions rather than the normal 4.

These are the actions you can set to any of the corners of your corners:

# Open the control panel
# Lock/Switch User
# Open my documents
# Run any application or folder
# Start your screensaver
# Search google
# Show your desktop
# Put your computer into standby mode

As you can see, Hot Corners utility for Windows is able to Lock your computer without using running the screensaver and setting a password to resume. For me, the actions I’d set for the 4 corners would be, Lock, Show Desktop, and the other 2 will run my favorite web browser(Firefox) and email client(The Bat). One thing I’d suggest to add on to Hot Corners is the ability to launch it as service and make it hidden. I don’t like to have so many unnecessary icons sitting on my tray bar.

Note: Prevx recently identified the uninstaller for Hot Corners as a virus because it places itself in the WINDOWS folder. However, rest assured that Hot Corners is NOT a virus.

[ Download Hot Corners Windows v2.2.2.0 ]

Technorati Tags: Hot Corners, Exposé, screen saver, utility, freeware