The new Skype beta we told you about seems to have a lot of people unhappy due to the larger "conversation" window that takes up a lot of screen real estate. I’ve seen a number of people complain about this including Laptop Magazine’s Joanna Stern who is using Skype on a lot of those mini-notebooks with no screen real estate to spare. I decided to see what could be done about that large Skype window and I’m happy to report that shrinking it down to a proper size is very simple to do. First up, here’s a screen snap of the default Skype beta with the main window shrunk as much as possible:
This was taken on screen with a screen resolution of 1280×768. The Skype window is still pretty big and it’s easy to see why some are complaining about it. The problematic pane is the conversation pane on the right where Kevin’s shadow is located. When in a video call this is where the video is displayed and when in a text chat that is displayed here. This pane in combination with the contacts pane on the left is what makes this new Skype window too large. I did some experimenting and discovered you can easily pop the conversation pane into a separate window all by itself:
As you can see this text chat pane is no bigger than the old Skype window and quite manageable. Paring the conversation pane out by itself is a simple matter of tapping the little round button in the upper right of the pane. When you hover over it Skype tells you the button will "show the conversation in a separate window". Once you have the chat window split off you can just minimize the main Skype window and it’s totally out of the way. You can split the video window off the same way and shrink it down as small as you want and free up most of the screen for other things.
All of these screens were taken at 1280×768 resolution which is the primary advantage I find the HP Mini-Note has over other mini-notebooks. Part of the difficulty that others are having with screen real estate is due to most mini-notebooks, like the Asus EEE PC 1000h, only run at 1024×600 which is not big enough for multi-tasking like this.



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