I’ve been living with Windows 7 for a estimable few months now and in that time have discovered a couple of limited ‘hidden gems’ which I wanted to portion with you:
Aero Shake – In Windows 7, when you click on the title bar of any window and shake it every other start window gets minimised straight relieve in to your taskbar, reducing clutter on your screen. This allows you to focus on the one window and then when ready shake it again and the other windows will reappear.
Additional Aero features include Aero Snap which allows you to lickety-split and easily rearrange your desktop by placing any inaugurate window to the left, legal or top of your cloak and Aero gawk which allows you to immediately view what an application is doing by hovering over the icon in the task bar.
Sticky Notes – Proof, if needed, that some of the simplest applications build the largest differences to the end user experience. One of the most commonly extinct applications on my PC venerable to be the incredibly simple ‘notepad’ as I net that my working life works a lot better if I simplify everything down in to lists.
Rather than jotting notes on random pieces of paper that will almost certainly find lost throughout the day I customary to dump everything in notepad and ensure that every line was eventually cleared so I was left with a blank page before I went home.
Sticky notes is similar to notepad but makes the organisation a miniature easier and more logical. Simply click on the Windows inaugurate menu and type sticky to open typing notes. Then, when complete you can either minimise or halt the application to regain help to your work. When you reopen Sticky Notes, the tasks will be indicate exactly as they were left. Notes can be easily deleted with one click of the mouse.
Improved Calculator – Windows 7 calculator has improved considerably; now rather than being an arithmetic only affair, it can be operated in four modes – Standard, Scientific, Programmer and Statistical. It can also perform unit conversion, for example grams to ounces, metres to feet and Celsius to Fahrenheit along with a couple of unexpected features such as the ability to calculate the number of days between two dates or the value of your mortgage repayment. Surely in the next version of Windows the calculator application will finally obtain graphical capabilities.
Windows Disk Image Burner – For some time now the preferred scheme of copying and storing CD’s and DVD’s has been by using an ISO file; a single image which includes the contents of an entire disk. Reading these files extinct to require a specific application (the likes of which I’ve covered previously in Click) but every version of Windows 7 now includes benefit for these straight out the box; simply double click on the ISO file that you wish to burn, insert a blank CD or DVD and you’re done.