Tom Revell at Zhorn Software is a friend I've never met. His Stickies freeware is a fabulous find as well as an award-winning bit of software. It gets Five Stars from users and reviewers alike.
The image shown above is directly from the Zhorn site -- it shows how you can alter the colors and fonts as you prefer. The actual stickies can be sized to fit your screen preferences, of course -- and they can be stacked, or hidden, unlike the example shown above. No, your screen need not be covered with stickies - these things are a help, not a hindrance!
Not only does Stickies 6.0 allow me to place virtual stickies on my computer screen, but it gives me an alarm function as well. I can share stickies with friends. I can hide them, make them opaque, attach them to specific files, and schedule them to open only when I need them.
Tom Revell describes his product this way:
"Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of Post-It notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.
"The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores all information in a single text-based ini file.
"Stickies will never support animated dancing figures, or play "Greensleeves". They are instead yellow rectangular windows onto which you can put some text notes. Once created, they will stay on screen until you take them away. Just like a real sticky piece of paper."
I can't recommend this program enough - it's a Must Have, to quote one of the User Reviews at Snapfiles.
For reviews (all Five Star), see: FreewareGenius, Snapfiles, Softsea, CNetDownload.com, VersionTracker.