You spent the weekend trudging through a reformat to load Windows 7, and now you want to know what your time and money have earned you. There are plenty of toplists that could give you the skinny, but none quite like ours. Sure, we paid lip-service to old news like Jump Lists and Aero Peek, but we’re hot for lesser-known goodies like ATA TRIM and WDDM v1.1. So, if you’ve been hunting for the real scoop on Microsoft’s newest, put your peepers on these 20 brand spanking new features.
Aero Snap
Windows of Microsoft past used ugly phrases like “tile windows vertically” to ask the question: “Hey, do you want to put these windows side by side?” Windows 7 kicked that to the curb with a little feature called Aero Snap. Simply drag a window to the left or right edges of the screen and it will automatically be resized to fill half of the screen’s vertical real estate. Windows can also be maximized by dragging them to the top of the screen.
Aero Snap can also be managed with the keyboard by holding the Windows key and using the arrows. Left and right move the window through vertical stacks, while the up arrow maximizes, and the down arrow minimizes. You can even bring minimized applications back with the keyboard by holding the Windows key and pressing the number key that corresponds with that application’s position on the task bar.
Application pinning
Windows quick launch is dead and gone, but it has been replaced by the much easier “Pin Application” feature. Where quick launch made users rummage through C:\ to create a new shortcut in a buried folder, adding taskbar shortcuts on Windows 7 is as easy as right clicking on a running app and hitting “Pin this program to taskbar.” A pinned program will keep its icon as a shortcut on the taskbar even if it’s closed.
Problem Steps Recorder
Family tech support people know how miserable it is to hear “I DON’T KNOW, IT JUST DOESN’T WORK” from clueless parents raging at their PC. Now there is a way to conclusively determine that ol’ dad isn’t even clicking the right button, and it lies in a tool called the Problem Steps Recorder.
Once recording has started, PSR logs every click, every press of the enter key, every application launched, and every menu accessed until stopped. All of that data goes into a chronological report (complete with screenshots) that is automatically zipped for emailing to you, the thankless family tech support guy!
Dying to know what a report looks like? We’ve made a sample one for you.
Rearrange applications
Productivity junkies know that it’s a big pain in the ass when apps on the taskbar aren’t in the expected order. Many a nerd have closed all their programs and reopened them in the right order to satiate this obsession. Thankfully, Windows 7 has killed that practice too: Applications on the taskbar can be reordered just by dragging them around.