Resizable windows are one of the key parts of the window metaphor. Unfortunately, not every piece of software follows this design standard. For example, how many times have you gone to a Properties panel, only to discover you had to scroll? Stop this madness now with ResizeEnable.

What it does

ResizeEnable is a very small portable program (42 KB download size) that does one simple thing: Allow users to resize non-resizable windows. For example, you can turn this…

…into this:

ResizeEnable isn’t just for vertical enlargement either; it works for horizontal enlargement, too. For instance, I needed to get a URL from a list…

…but the list was truncated before the URL ended. Using ResizeEnable, I was able to make the window horizontally wider, and get the URL I am looking for:

Resizing Windows

Resizing windows with ResizeEnable is as easy as running the program and mousing over the edges of windows. When you mouse of the edge of a window, you should see the double-sided resizing arrow, like so:

Once the double-sided arrow appears, simply click + drag to resize the window. This double-sided arrow appears at all four sides so you can resize from any edge; it also appears at the corners so you can resize diagonally, too, if you want.

Things to note

There are a few things to note about ResizeEnable:

• First and foremost, realize ResizeEnable does not work with all windows. It works with *most* non-resizable windows, but not all. The ones that it doesn’t work with are the ones that don’t code to “normal” coding standards (whatever that means, haha.)
• Secondly, ResizeEnable tries to proportionately scale the contents of a window to match the new window size. While this doesn’t work with all windows, the content scaling works with most windows.
• Thirdly, if a window has “child” windows that popup, ResizeEnable attempts to automatically resize those child windows to be proportional to the new size you gave the parent window. Like the previously two mentioned points, while this works with most windows, it doesn’t work with all.
• Fourthly (is that a word?), windows resized with ResizeEnable are not permanent. Once you close/reopen a window, it goes back to its normal size.
• Lastly, ResizeEnable appears to no longer be in developement. The last version – v1.4 – was updated in 2003. However, it still works on Windows 7 so presumably it works on all previous version of Windows – like Vista – that were released after 2003.

Conclusion

ResizeEnable is a great way to resize annoying windows, and at less than two megabytes of RAM usage, it’s efficient too. Although it may not work on every window, using ResizeEnable isl a good way to resize non-resizable windows

You can grab ResizeEnable from the following links:

Version reviewed: v1.4

Supported OS: Windows 98 and higher

Download size: 42 KB

Malware scan: VirusTotal scan results – (0/43)

ResizeEnable homepage [direct download]