Hey,

A couple of times now I have cleaned my mouse and accidentally opened up some feature in windows 7 that darkens the screen background and displays all the windows fitted on the screen.

This is not tiling or cascading - it's something different.

I can't see how I did it, but it must have been a mouse action. Anyone know what I am going on about ?

Not a clue, Mate. Given that I can't see what you did, I couldn't even venture a guess.

It wasn't the show desktop thing you get when you put the cursor in the bottom left hand side of the screen is it Freddy?

I do that one all the time by accident 

Nope it's not DD.

I've never seen it before on any version of windows.

You know how on some sites if you click on an image it brings the image up and then darkens the surrounding screen ? It's like that, but instead of the image it's my windows.

I can't see what I could have clicked to recreate it.

If it happens again, hit [PrtScn], open your graphics app, paste and post.

If it isn't ALT + TAB or WIN + TAB, the only two I know, but there might be others    then I guess it could be some kind of mouse feature maybe that got installed with the mouse software. 

Not those. Nothing on the mouse is doing it. Weird. Oh well thanks all for trying.

There are TONS of [winKey]+[something else] combinations, so if it involved the keyboard it could be almost anything, but I got the impression that it was a combination of only mouse buttons hit. Again, seeing as I don't know what mouse Freddy uses, I again have no clue.

These windows features work in different ways depending on having Aero on or off. 

I got it to do it again, bizarrely by cleaning the mouse again. I can't figure out the mouse combination.

Got an image :



I thought the screen darkened, but maybe it doesn't.

That looks like a video glitch, similar to one that I get when the screensaver stops. Normally, I only get that "blackness" on either Firefox or Chrome browsers, and from the looks of it, your Chrome is the thing affected. AMD vid card, right?

AMD yes.

I think you may be right - I could recreate it with buttons briefly. But then it stopped doing it - so I don't think it is an intended feature.

Oddly the transition to that screenshot was animated - it sort of zoomed them. Very odd 

It's some kind of mouse feature, Microsoft mice do something like that

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ReviewMicrosoftTouchMouseForWindows7.aspx

Try turning Aero on, it might fix Chrome not working, by turning it off you are in affect disabling acceleration on the desktop, but I understand your card does struggle with 2D acceleration