Windows 7 Tips and TricksChris HenleySenior IT Pro EvangelistMicrosoft Corp.

Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 1: Shuffling Through Program Windows Tip 2: Managing Your WindowsTip 3: Project Your Display With EaseTip 4: Multi-Monitor Window ManagementTip 5: Aero Peek Your DesktopTip 6: Live Clutter-FreeTip 7: Help the Help Desk Help You

Shuffling Through Program Windows

Windows 7 allows you to switch through same program windows with ease.

Example: running multiple documents in Microsoft Word

Press down on the Ctrl key while clicking the icon from the taskbar. Each click will change the window to the next in the sequence, in the order that you opened them.

Managing Your WindowsWindows 7 simplifies document and program management by allowing you to “dock” a window or manipulate its size with one mouse maneuver or a simple keystroke.

To dock your window on one half of the screen, drag it to the left or right and it will change its size to fit that half of the screen.

To manipulate the vertical size of a window, drag the window to the top to maximize it, or double-click the window’s top or bottom border to maximize it vertically while keeping the same width. You can also perform all of these functions with keystrokes:

+Left Arrow and +Right Arrow dock to half the screen

+Up Arrow and + Down Arrow maximize and minimize

+Shift+Up Arrow and +Shift+Down Arrow maximize and restore vertical size.

Project Your Display With EasePlugging in a projector and projecting your display is a snap with the Windows 7 driver display utility, displayswitch.exe. Press:+P to display the following easy-to-navigate pop-up window:

By hitting your arrow keys (or +P) you can switch through multiple display settings, such as “clone”, “extend” or “external only.

If you want broader control over presentation settings, you can also press Win+X to open the Windows Mobility Center, which allows you to turn on a presentation “mode” that switches IM clients to do not disturb, disables screensavers, sets a neutral wallpaper etc.

Multi-Monitor Window ManagementUse multiple monitors conveniently in Windows 7.

When working in multi-monitors, use the keyboard shortcuts +Shift+Left Arrow and +Shift+Right Arrow to toggle between monitors.

The new window will keep its relative position to the top-left origin of the original.

Aero Peek Your Desktop

A versatile tool introduced with Windows 7 is the Windows® Aero® feature, “Aero Peek”. Click the rectangle in the lower right hand corner of the task bar for quick access to your desktop.

The keyboard shortcut +Space performs the same function.

Aero Peek

Live Clutter-Free

Windows 7 gets rid of all the superfluous windows behind your active window.

Hit +Home to minimize all inactive windows. To restore the windows just press +Home again.

Help the Help Desk Help YouSolving problems unique to a machine can be an arduous task for both the end-user and the help desk. Windows 7 introduces the Problem Steps Recorder, a screen-capture tool that allows the end-user to record the problems they’re having step-by-step. The program is accessible from the Control Panel under “Record steps to reproduce a problem” or run psr.exe from Explorer.Hit “record” the add in comments as needed. A HTML-based file is converted to a .ZIP folder, which is easily passed on to the help desk.

…More Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 8: Sticky Notes Avoid Sticky SituationsTip 9: Adaptive Display BrightnessTip 10: Notify Me, My WayTip 11: Authority over the Power Switch Tip 12: .ISO FilesTip 13: Locale Specific

Sticky Notes Avoid Sticky Situations

Instead of using paper, use Windows 7 Sticky Notes. Enjoy the variety of seven fun Sticky Note colors by right-clicking the note.

Need another sticky note reminder? Click the + sign in the top left corner of the existing note to create a new one. To access Sticky Notes, run StikyNot.exe or click Start → All Programs → Accessories → Sticky Notes.

Adaptive Display BrightnessThe display on a typical mobile PC consumes more battery power than any other part of the computer. Windows 7 automatically reduces display brightness after a period of inactivity, much like cell phones do today. In addition, Windows 7 intelligently adapts to your activity. For example, if the screen dims after 30 seconds and you immediately move the mouse to brighten the display, Windows 7 will wait 60 seconds before dimming the display again.

Notify Me, My WayWindows 7 helps solve more problems, and, solve them on your schedule. The Action Center is a new, integrated Control Panel experience that provides a central place to go for tasks and notifications associated with keeping your computer running smoothly.

You’ll see fewer notifications on your desktop because the Action Center consolidates alerts from ten existing Windows features.

When Windows 7 needs your attention, you’ll see a new icon in the notification area. To find out more, click the icon to see a menu that offers options for directly addressing the issue, or you can go to the Action Center for more details. In addition, you can choose which notifications you’re interested in hearing about. From the Control Panel go to System Security Action Center and click the “Change Action Center settings” link on the left to choose which alerts to receive.

Authority over the Power Switch

On the Windows 7 Start Menu, the default power option is a simple shut down.

If you’d like a different action, you can easily change your default to Switch User, Log Off, Lock, Restart, or Sleep.

Right-click the Start button, select Properties, and under the Start Menu tab, select the “Power Button Action” that suits you best.

.ISO FilesBurning files is a snap! Windows 7 introduces an easy to use applet that makes burning an .ISO image simple. Instructions:Double click the DVD or CD .ISO image and the “Burn Disk Image” applet automatically appears.a) Place a blank unformatted CD or DVD into your CD/DVD drive.b) Right click on the .ISO or .IMG file you want to use to burn a disc.c) Click Burn disc image.d) Next to Disc burner, click on the drop down arrow and select the

CD/DVD drive with the blank disc you want to burn to. e) Check the Verify disc after burning option if you want Windows to

verify the disc image afterburning the disc. Note that you should skip verification if you are in a hurry, as this process requires additional time.

f) When it finishes burning the disc image to disc, click the Close button.

The DVD (or CD) is now ready to be used without ever having to find, install, and use a third-party tool.

Locale SpecificOne of the many new features in Windows 7 is the Control Panel’s Default Location where you can store your location information (Country, ZIP code, geographical coordinates). Internet applications that are location dependent are faster when your location is known, for example, finding attractions near you. Also, programs can find and download files faster when your location is known.

From the Control Panel click → Clock, Language, and Region → Change Location → Default Location, and enter your location information.

…More Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 14: Change the Scenery Tip 15: Crunch The Numbers Tip 16: Smart PrintingTip 17: Shake It UpTip 18: Clean Your Desktop! And Order It Too Tip 19: Right-Click ManiaTip 20: Unveil Your Hidden Drives

Change the SceneryWindows 7 allows you to personalize your desktop background with a new shuffle feature for your desktop.You can program your desktop background to shuffle through your favorite images and get a change of scenery as often as you like. To enable the shuffle feature, right click on your Desktop and select “Personalize,” then “Desktop Background.” Choose the folder where your favorite images or photos are stored and select as many as you like. Make sure you check the “Shuffle” box, and choose how often you’d like your images to shuffle.

Crunch The NumbersThe new Windows 7 calculator is a number cruncher’s dream.New functionality allows calculations in the following modes:Standard ScientificProgrammer Statistics . And that’s not all! Conversion formulas are available for:

TemperatureWeightAreaTime

Templates for gas mileage, lease estimations, and mortgage estimations are available as well!

Smart Printing

Windows 7 allows for several default printers in several locations with Location Aware Printing.

There is no need to reset your default or remember what the printer name is; Windows 7 will figure out whether you’re at home or at work with Location Aware Printing.

Shake It UpRemember the Etch-a-Sketch where you would shake it to make things disappear? Windows 7 uses the same shake concept to help you manage your windows.

Windows 7 Aero®Shake allows you to clear the inactive windows from your desktop by “shaking” over the window you’re working. Hover your mouse over the title bar of your active window, left-click and shake from side to side, and all your inactive windows will disappear.

To bring them back, repeat the procedure and shake everything back into view.

Clean Your Desktop! And Order It Too

You’ve always been able to auto-arrange your desktop icons by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing “Sort By.” Windows 7 makes it even easier. To auto-arrange the desktop icons according to your default settings, simply press and hold F5.

Order is instantly accomplished.

Right-Click ManiaIn Windows 7, right-clicking may just be your secret friend. There are many ways the right-click can simplify your computing experience. Here are just a few:

a. Right-click any empty spot in your desktop, and you have the control to change the screen resolution.

b. Right-click any of the icons in the Taskbar to “Unpin this program from the Taskbar.”

c. Right-click the Taskbar Explorer icon to access your most frequently used folders.

Unveil Your Hidden DrivesSee the drives that aren’t currently in use when you open My Computer. Click Computer → Alt to see the toolbar → Tools → Folder Options → View (tab) →Uncheck “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder.”And they magically appear!

…More Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 21: Find a File or a Song You Want – InstantlyTip 22: See All Your Open Windows EasilyTip 23: Keep What You Want Within Easy ReachTip 24: Compare Two Windows Side-by-SideTip 25: Stay One Click Away From the Programs You Use MostTip 26: Connect Wireless Devices to Your Network More EasilyTip 27: Make Your Web Faster, Safer and EasierTip 28: Personalize Your PC

Find a File or a Song You Want — Instantly

Find just about anything on your PC – from programs and documents to songs – just by typing in a few letters of the program’s name, a word from a document, or a song title.

You can even search external hard drives and other Windows 7-based PCs and servers on your home network.

To find what you want:Click open the Start menu and start typing in the search box at the bottom of the menu, then,Select what you want from the list of search results which instantly appears.

If it’s on your PC, Windows 7.booklet will find it.

See All Your Open Windows Easily

When you have lots of windows open, Windows 7 makes is simpler to find the one you want. You can see all of the windows from your taskbar and switch through them with ease.

To view and switch windows:

Hover the cursor over that program’s icon to see all of theopen windows, then,Hover over the previews to see the full screen.Click on the preview to switch to the window you want to see.

Keep What You Want Within Easy Reach

Jump Lists in Windows 7 will help you keep your desktop free of clutter and find files quickly. They’re automatically populated based on how often and how recently you do things, so you’ll spend less time looking for your favorite song or the document you worked on yesterday.There’s a Jump List for each program on your Start menu and taskbar. With one click you can:

See frequently and recently viewed Web sites on the Jump List for Internet Explorer ® 8.Drag and drop a file from the Jump List into Outlook ® as an attachment.See options to play a recent song or a playlist on the Jump List for Windows Media ® Player.

Compare Two Windows Side-by-Side

Snap helps you quickly resize windows for better viewing and easily compare two documents side-by-side.

Here’s how it works:Drag the window to either side of your screen. When the mouse pointer hits the side of the screen, the window will snap to half of your screen.

To expand a window vertically drag either the top or bottom border to the edge of your screen. When the mouse pointer hits the edge, the window will snap to maximize vertically while keeping the same width.

+ Left Arrow and + Right Arrow snap to half the screen + Up Arrow and + Down Arrow maximize and minimize + Shift +Up Arrow and + Shift + Down Arrow maximize and restore vertical size

Stay One Click Away From the Programs You Use Most

You can pin the programs you use most on your taskbar so that you can access them with one click.Hover your cursor over the favorite program and drag it to the taskbar, orRight click on it and choose “ pin to taskbar”.Your program will then be pinned to the taskbar. To open the program, just click on the icon on your taskbar. You can unpin any program at any time.

Connect Wireless Devices to Your Network More Easily

With Windows 7, wireless set-up is easier than ever. You can add wireless devices that are certified for Windows 7, including printers, network attached storage devices, and digital media players to your network in just a few steps.

Launch the ‘Add a Device’ wizard, thenType in the PIN located on the device.

Windows will automatically connect the device to your wireless network.

Make Your Web Faster, Safer, and EasierWindows Internet Explorer 8 makes using the web faster, safer, and easier than ever. Some new features include:

Web Slices help keep track of information on a specific web page right from your Internet Explorer 8 toolbar.

It’s easier than ever to follow an auction on eBay or keep up with the latest sports headlines from ESPN.

The Instant Search box in Internet Explorer 8 returns search results in real-time, as you type. And the search results can include pictures and rich text, so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

• The SmartScreen ® filter helps protect you from phishing scams and from Web sites that attempt to download malicious software to your PC.

• InPrivate TM browsing helps protect your privacy so that there will be no record of your browsing activity after you’ve closed the browser.

Personalize Your PCMake your Windows 7 PC look the way you want it to. With Windows 7, there are more and easier ways to personalize your PC.

Right-click on your desktop, then Click Personalize to:

Choose from many beautiful and expressive built-in themes, orTurn your desktop background into a slide show of your favorite photos.

Click Gadgets to:Add gadgets to your desktop so information you frequently need – from traffic conditions to stock quotes to upcoming appointments – is just a glance away.

…More Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 29: Command Junkies OnlyTip 30: It’s a Global VillageTip 31: The Font of All KnowledgeTip 32: GabriolaTip 33: Who Stole My Browser? Tip 34: Rearranging the FurnitureTip 35: It’s A DragTip 36: Standards Support

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

Command Junkies Only

One of the most popular power toys in Windows XP was “Open Command Prompt Here”, which enabled you to use the graphical shell to browse around the file system and then use the context menu to open a command prompt at the current working directory. In Windows 7 hold the Shift key down while selecting the context menu to get exactly the same effect. If the current working directory is a network location, it will automatically map a drive letter for you.

It’s a Global VillageWallpapers match the locale you selected when you installed Windows.

For example, for US locale, you’ll see beautiful views of Crater Lake in Oregon, the Arches National Park, a beach in Hawai’i, etc.)

Several sets of themed wallpapers are installed based on the language you choose, but the others are in a hidden directory. If you’re feeling in an international mood, simply browse to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and you’ll see a series of pictures under the Wallpaper directory for each country.

Double-click on the theme file in the Theme directory to display a rotation through all the pictures for that country. (Note that some countries contain a generic set of placeholder art for now.)

The Font of All KnowledgeFont installation is a snap– there is now a “Install” button to the font viewer applet that takes care of the installation process:

There are lots of other new features built into Windows 7 that will satisfy those of a typographic bent, incidentally – grouping multiple weights together, the ability to hide fonts based on regional settings, a new text rendering engine built into the DirectWrite API, and support in the Font common file dialog for more than the four “standard” weights. For example:

 

GabriolaAs well as the other typographic features mentioned above, Windows 7 includes Gabriola, an elaborate display type from the Tiro Typeworks foundry that takes advantage of OpenType Layout to provide a variety of stylistic sets, flourishes and ornamentation ligatures:

Who Stole My Browser?

If Internet Explorer is taking a long time to load your page, it’s worth taking a look at the add-ons installed.

One of the more helpful little additions in Internet Explorer 8 is instrumentation for add-on initialization, allowing you to quickly see whether you’re sitting around waiting for plug-ins to load.

Click Tools / Manage Add-ons, and then scroll right in the list view to see the load time.

Disable add-ons that you don’t use it from the same dialog box.

Rearranging the FurnitureUnless you’ve seen it demonstrated, you may not know that the icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place.

You can reorder them to suit your needs, whether they’re pinned shortcuts or running applications. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3, etc.

What’s less well-known is that you can similarly drag the system tray icons around to rearrange their order, or move them in and out of the hidden icon list. It’s an easy way to customize your system to show the things you want, where you want them.

It’s a DragMuch play has been made of the Jump Lists feature in Windows 7, allowing applications like Windows Live Messenger to offer an easy task-based entry point.

Jump lists replace the default right-click context menu in the new taskbar; another way to access them is by left-clicking and dragging up in a kind of “swooshing” motion. This was designed for touch-enabled devices where the same gesture applies.

Another place where you can “swoosh” (not an official Microsoft term) is the IE 8 address bar, where the downward drag gesture brings up an expanded list containing the browser history, favorites and similar entries. The slower you drag, the cooler the animation!

Standards SupportWordPad can now read and write both the Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML file format but also the OpenDocument specification:

…More Windows 7 Tips and Tricks

Tip 37: Running with Elevated RightsTip 38: One More of the Same, PleaseTip 39: Specialized Windows SwitchingTip 40: Starting Explorer from “My Computer”Tip 41: ClearType Text Tuning and Display Color CalibrationTip 42: When All Else Fails…

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

Running with Elevated Rights

Want to quickly launch a taskbar-docked application as an administrator?

Hold down Ctrl+Shift while you click on the icon, and you’ll immediately launch it with full administrative rights (assuming your account has the necessary permissions, of course!)

One More of the Same, PleaseIf you’ve already got an application open on your desktop (for example, a command prompt window), and you want to open a second instance of the same application, you don’t have to go back to the start menu.

You can simply hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon, and it will open a new instance of the application rather than switching to the existing application.

For a keyboard-free shortcut, you can middle-click with the third mouse button to do the same thing.

Specialized Windows SwitchingAnother feature that power users will love

is the ability to do a kind of “Alt+Tab” switching across windows that belong to just one application.

For example, if you’ve got five Outlook message windows open along with ten other windows, you can quickly tab through just the Outlook windows by holding down the Ctrl key while you repeatedly click on the single Outlook icon. This will toggle through each of the five Outlook windows in order, and is way faster than opening Alt+Tab and trying to figure out which of the tiny thumbnail images relates to the specific message you’re trying to find.

Starting Explorer from “My Computer”If you spend more time manipulating files outside

of the documents folders than inside, you might want to change the default starting directory for Windows Explorer so that it opens at the Computer node:

Navigate to Windows Explorer in the Start Menu (it’s in the Accessories folder). Then edit the properties and change the target to read: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /root,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

ClearType Text Tuning and Display Color Calibration

If you want to tune up your display for image or text display, we have the tools included out of the box. It’s amazing what a difference this makes: by slightly darkening the color of the text and adjusting the gamma back a little, this laptop display looks much crisper than it did before.

Check out cttune.exe and dccw.exe respectively, or run the applets from Control Panel.

You’d adjust the brightness and contrast settings on a fancy 42” HDTV: do the same for the computer displays that you stare at every day! 

When All Else Fails…There are always those times when you’re in a really bad spot – you can’t boot up properly, and what you really want is something you can quickly use to get at a command prompt so you can properly troubleshoot.

Windows 7 now includes the ability to create a system repair disc, which is essentially a CD-bootable version of Windows that just includes the command prompt and a suite of system tools. Type “system repair disc” in the Start Menu search box, and you’ll be led to the utility.

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