Hello and welcome to "The Complete Guide To Windows". My name is Geoffrey Conti and I am a certified Microsoft Professional. With the official release of Windows 7 on October 22nd, there is finally some good buzz concerning Windows and Microsoft.
The new OS doesn't try to dazzle you, but instead tries to disappear except for when you need it. Now does that sound like Windows to you? Didn't think so, but the underlyings of Windows 7 do just that and more. Instead of hyped up glitz, we get low key, useful new features. UAC has been sent to obedience school, and bundled applications have been dropped and made available as downloadable extras. Windows 7 attempts to fix annoyances old and new. In comparison, Vista offered a flashy new interface with "Aero", but was ill fated from the beginning. It's compatibility gotchas, and low performance left many people who upgraded regretting the move. And many others just refused to leave Windows XP behind.
Interface: The New Taskbar
The new Taskbar replaces the old small icons and text labels for running apps with larger, unlabeled icons. If you can keep the icons straight, the new design painlessly reduces Taskbar clutter. If you don't like it, you can shrink the icons and/or bring the labels back.
In the past, you could get one-click access to programs by dragging their icons to the Quick Launch toolbar. Windows 7 eliminates Quick Launch and folds its capabilities into the Taskbar. Drag an app's icon from the Start menu or desktop to the Taskbar, and Windows will pin it there, so you can launch the program without rummaging around in the Start menu. You can also organize icons in the Taskbar by moving them to new positions.
To indicate that a particular application on the Taskbar is running, Windows draws a subtle box around its icon--so subtle, in fact, that figuring out whether the app is running can take a moment, especially if its icon sits between two icons for running apps.
In Windows Vista, hovering the mouse pointer over an application's Taskbar icon produces a thumbnail window view known as a Live Preview. But when you have multiple windows open, you see only one preview at a time. Windows 7's version of this feature is slicker and more efficient: Hover the pointer on an icon, and thumbnails of the app's windows glide into position above the Taskbar, so you can quickly find the one you're looking for. (The process would be even simpler if the thumbnails were larger and easier to decipher.)
Also new in Windows 7's Taskbar is a feature called Jump Lists. These menus resemble the context-sensitive ones you get when you right-click within various Windows applications, except that you don't have to be inside an app to use them. Internet Explorer 8's Jump List, for example, lets you open the browser and load a fresh tab, initiate an InPrivate stealth browsing session, or go directly to any of eight frequently visited Web pages. Non-Microsoft apps can offer Jump Lists, too, if their developers follow the guidelines for creating them.
Other Windows 7 interface adjustments are minor, yet so sensible that you may wonder why Windows didn't include them all along. Shove a window into the left or right edge of the screen and it'll expand to fill half of your desktop. Nudge another into the opposite edge of the screen, and it'll expand to occupy the other half. That makes comparing two windows' contents easy. If you nudge a window into the top of the screen, it will maximize to occupy all of the display's real estate.
The extreme right edge of the Taskbar now sports a sort of nub; hover over it, and open windows become transparent, revealing the desktop below. (Microsoft calls this feature Aero Peek.) Click the nub, and the windows scoot out of the way, giving you access to documents or apps that reside on the desktop and duplicating the Show Desktop feature that Quick Launch used to offer.
Getting at your desktop may soon become even more important than it was in the past. That's because Windows 7 does away with the Sidebar, the portion of screen space that Windows Vista reserved for Gadgets such as a photo viewer and a weather applet. Instead of occupying the Sidebar, Gadgets now sit directly on the desktop, where they don't compete with other apps for precious screen real estate.
The New System Tray: In the past, Window's system tray was unarguably the most annoying feature of the OS. It quickly grew with applets that users didn't want in the first place. Many of the uninvited guests employed word balloons and other intrusive methods to alert users to uninteresting facts that appeared at the most inopportune moments.
In Windows 7, software installers, can’t dump applets into the system tray. Applets instead, land in a holding pen that appears only when you click it, a much needed improvement over previous incarnations of the System Tray. Applets in the holding pen can’t show balloon tips unless you permit them too. They can be dragged into, and out of the tray, giving much needed control over the System Tray.
A new area called Action Center—a revamped version of Vista’s Security Center—cues up alerts about security issues, troubleshooting issues, and the like. This keeps the OS from badgering you with constant balloon tips and lets you view them at your convenience.
The Library System: File Management
In Windows 7, employer hasn’t changed as much as the Taskbar and the System Tray. The two new ways to get to your files are Libraries and HomeGroups.
Libraries act like file cabinets, as they let you related folders in one place. The default libraries are Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos, each of which initially directs you to the OS's standard folders for storing the named items--such as My Pictures and Public Pictures.
In order to benefit from Libraries, you have to customize them. Right-click any folder on your hard drive, and you can add it to any Library; for instance, you can transform the Music Library into a collection of all the folders containing MP3s on your system. You can also create your own Libraries, such as one that bundles up all folders that relate to your vacation plans.
The one thing Microsoft left out, was the ability to integrate Libraries with Saved Searches, the Windows feature (introduced in Vista) that lets you create virtual folders based on searches, such as one that finds every .jpg image file on your system. But while Windows 7 lets you add standard folders to a Library, it doesn't support Saved Searches.
HomeGroups, Swee HomeGroups? Closely related to Libraries are HomeGroups, a new feature designed to simplify the notoriously tricky process of networking Windows PCs. Machines that are part of one HomeGroup can selectively grant each other read or read/write access to their Libraries and to the folders they contain, so you can perform such mundane but important tasks as providing your spouse with access to a folderful of tax documents on your computer. HomeGroups can also stream media, enabling you to pipe music or a movie off the desktop in the den onto your notebook in the living room. And they let you share a printer connected to one PC with all the other computers in the HomeGroup, a useful feature if you can't connect the printer directly to the network.
HomeGroups aren't a bad idea, but Windows 7's implementation seems half-baked. HomeGroups are password-protected, but rather than inviting you to specify a password of your choice during initial setup, Windows assigns you one consisting of ten characters of alphanumeric gibberish and instructs you to write it down so you won't forget it. To be fair, passwords made up of random characters provide excellent security, and the only time you need the password is when you first connect a new PC to a HomeGroup. But it's still a tad peculiar that you can't specify a password you'll remember during setup--you can do that only after the fact, in a different part of the OS. More annoying and limiting: HomeGroups won't work unless all of the PCs in question are running Windows 7, a scenario that won't be typical anytime soon. A version that also worked on XP, Vista, and Mac systems would have been cooler.
Federated Search, a new Windows Explorer feature, feels incomplete, too. It uses the OpenSearch standard to give Win 7's search "connectors" for external sources. That capability allows you to search sites such as Flickr and YouTube from within Explorer. Pretty neat--except that Windows 7 doesn't come with any of the connectors you'd need to add these sources, nor with any way of finding them. (They are available on the Web, though. Use a search engine to track them down.)
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