When you’ve several applications open on your PC desktop, organising their windows efficiently can take a moment. You might move one window over here, drag a border over there, and so it goes on.

If you’d rather just automate the process, though, you might prefer WinMaximumize, which can instantly expand your selected window to fill whatever desktop space is available.

The program is free, portable and a single 332KB executable, so there’s no need to worry about adware, Registry clutter or indeed anything else. Just unzip the file and it’s ready for use.

The program's hotkeys can easily be customised to suit your needs

And the simplest way to properly understand WinMaximumize is to then create a simple test. Minimize everything currently on the desktop, for instance, then launch two copies of Notepad: place one top left of the screen, the other bottom right (but not overlapping).

Now select one copy of Notepad, press the WinMaximumize hotkey (Ctrl+F1 by default, though you can change this from the program’s system tray icon), and immediately you’ll see its window expand to the edges of the desktop and the other Notepad instance.

And if that’s not what you expected, or you finish what you’re doing and want to return to the previous arrangement, just press Ctrl+Shift+F1 (again reconfigurable) and the program will restore the original window size and position.

This is all very simple and easy to use, then. So we were surprised to see the program requires a relatively large chunk of RAM (more than 15MB on our test PC). Not a great deal overall, but more than we expected for this type of tool.

If you’re always manually rearranging application windows, though, WinMaximumize could help save you a few seconds every day, and that’s probably enough to justify taking the program for a spin on your own PC.