This is such a small problem I hate to mention it. But it still bugs me.

When moving a window on the desktop, if I carelessly drag it far enough so that the cursor touches the top of the screen, that window changes to a full screen view.

On the extraordinarily rare occasions (maybe once every six months or so) that I want a window full screen, I am quite comfortable clicking the little box on the upper right of the window. On the many occasions (half a dozen times a day) that I drag a window to the top of the screen and inadvertently turn it into a full screen display, I say a few nasty words and click the little box on the upper right of the window.

Is there any way to turn this bug excuse me, "feature", off?

tanstaafl.

Yes.

One handy aspect of this feature is the ability to size a window to half the desktop: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/arrange-windows-side-by-side-on-the-desktop-using-snap

A few Windows to Mac converts I know missed this feature so much, they found 3rd party programs or scripted this into OS X.

It is the one feature I really miss from Windows, I use BetterSnapTool to approximate Windows-left and Windows-right (though the Windows implementation is much better, partly because it just doesn't work with some OSX apps).

What Roger said.

While you're in the Ease of Access center, there's about a dozen other things that you might want to turn off. For example, there are certain keyboard behaviors that, when you do them, will trigger the activation of certain features for people with disabilities. Such as holding down one of the Control keys for too long, or pressing one of the Shift keys too many times. Very irritating when those things happen to you when you're in the middle of, say, a gaming session where those activities might be a normal part of the game.

I'll just add that this feature existed in Windows 7, so blame/credit can go a little further back

I'm not a huge fan of the feature myself, but only due to having a 30" monitor, so I almost NEVER have any full-screen windows. It's one of the reasons I had zero interest in the "Metro" UI for Windows 8.

There's on component of this feature that I do use from time to time, but mostly on other people's computers. We've already covered how dragging the window to the top of the screen will maximize it, and dragging it to the left or right edge will dock it to that half. The one I use - particularly in the task manager - is where you click and drag only the top edge of a window up to the top of the screen, and that snaps it into filling the height of the screen. Like I said, I use this for the task manager so I can see as many of the running processes at once as possible. There are a couple other instances where it can be handy too, almost always involving long lists of things.

I seem to trigger that kind of annoying stuff more on Win8 than I did on Win7. Not sure why. I could go for days before noticing it on a freshly-installed Win7 system, but on a new Win8 system I'm scrambling to turn that shit off in the first ten minutes.