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Windows 7 Hidden Gems – Additional functionality

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:11:46 +0000

I’ve been living with Windows 7 for a good few months now and in that time have discovered a couple of little ‘hidden gems’ which I wanted to share with you:

Aero Shake
In Windows 7, when you click on the title bar of any window and shake it every other open window gets minimised straight back 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.

There are additional Aero user interface related features which make a welcome debut. These include Aero Peek which allows you to immediately see what’s going on in an application just by hovering over the icon in the task bar and Aero Snap which quickly allows you to rearrange your desktop by slamming any open window against the left, right or top side of your screen; try it!

Sticky Notes
Proof, if needed, that some of the simplest applications make the largest differences to the end user experience. One of the most commonly used applications on my PC used to be the incredibly simple ‘notepad’ as I find 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 get lost throughout the day I used 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 have a similar application. To get started click on the start menu and type in ‘sticky’ and begin typing tasks for the day or things to remember in to little post it notes that stick to your screen. When complete either close or minimise the application to get back to the job in hand, safe in the knowledge that once Sticky Notes are reopened, these tasks will reappear exactly as you left them. When a task has been completed or the note simply isn’t needed, it can be 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 gain graphical capabilities.

Windows Disk Image Burner
For some time now the preferred method 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 used to require a specific application (the likes of which I’ve covered previously in Click) but every version of Windows 7 now includes support 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.

Windows XP Powertoys

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 18:22:04 +0000

Years ago I used remember downloading a suite of programs designed to allow Windows users to add functionality to their Operating System as well as alter more advanced settings not readily available so whilst searching for something to write about today I thought I’d check that these products were still available free of charge from the Microsoft website. Fortunately the group of products known as ‘Windows Powertoys’ are not only still available but they have also recently been updated and so it seemed obvious that I should mention their existence in this article.

All these products designed for Windows XP were created after the Operating System had actually been released and can be downloaded from the rather uncatchy website address http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

Below I have listed what I believe to be the most useful PowerToys available along with a brief description of the functionality they will add to your Windows XP machine so you can decide whether you should spend your time downloading them:

Tweak UI

This is especially useful for more advanced Windows users as it allows you to alter more advanced settings in Windows XP which aren’t normally accessible through the standard Windows interface.

Alt-Tab Replacement

As you know when you hit and together you can cycle through the programs that are currently running to multitask between applications. This useful utility will change the selection box that appears so that you can actually preview the application in question before switching to it which is beneficial if you are running several instances of one program; for example five Internet Explorer windows.

Power Calculator

Particularly useful for mathematicians or scientists; this calculator allows you to draw graphs and work with functions which are features missing from the standard Windows calculator.

Image Resizer

This utility allows you to select a large number of images and instantly resize them which is useful particularly if you wish to make them smaller in order to send by e-mail or to save space on your hard drive.

Taskbar Magnifier

Particularly useful for those that have difficulty reading a computer screen; this utility allows you to magnify a given part of the screen on request.

Slide Shows

There are two utilities available here; one to create HTML slide shows of your digital pictures (useful for those wishing to publish their pictures on the Internet) as well as one designed for viewing images burned onto a CD as a slide show.

There are several other utilities other than the ones mentioned above that are certainly worth a look; I think that most Windows XP users would benefit from at least one of these and the good news is that as well as being free they can also be downloaded individually so you need only install the ones that you actually need. The size of the utilities varies from 0.2mb up to 2mb so even those on the most modest of connections shouldn’t have a problem downloading.