If you’ve ever thought Windows really should make better use of your mouse wheel, then Feel the Wheel will probably be of interest. It’s a tiny portable tool – and we do mean tiny, a 4.5KB download – which allows you to resize windows or tweak their transparency with the mouse wheel alone.

To give this a try, grab your copy of the download file, unzip it somewhere safe, double-click FeeWhee.exe and a high-pitched beep will tell you it’s loaded.

Now move your mouse cursor over a window title bar, spin your mouse wheel and the window will resize.

If you’d like to adjust a window’s transparency, just move your mouse cursor over that title bar, and spin the wheel again until you reach whatever transparency you need. (Be careful with this one, though. If you make a window completely transparent and lose track of its position, then you won’t easily be able to find the title bar to make it visible again.)

And when you’ve finished with the program, run the executable again and a lower-pitched beep will tell you that it’s unloaded itself. (There is no interface, so audio feedback is all you’re going to get.)

Okay, it’s true, there are plenty of tools which do similar things (and, usually, considerably more).

Feel the Wheel was there before most of them, though (the program dates from 2005, although it still works just fine on Windows 7). It doesn’t have an interface, so won’t clutter your system tray with yet another icon. And RAM use is only 2.5MB, probably too much for what it’s doing, but still fairly lightweight. The program may be basic, but it still does a good job, and so if you need a simple transparency tweaker then Feel the Wheel could be a sensible choice.