Seven Things I’ve Liked About Windows 7 in Seven Day
Ignoring the little bit of time I spent with Windows 7 RC, I’ve now been using Windows 7 for seven days. To celebrate my week with the new Operating System, I’d like to share my seven of the features that I’ve come so far that I’ve enjoyed having.
1. The New Windows 7 Taskbar and System Tray
It took me a few hours to get used to the new look and feel of the taskbar, but now I hate going back to my offices Windows XP machine and seeing that “old” look. Below is a sample of the my taskbar:
I can see at a quick glance that I have two IE windows open, no Windows Explorer windows open, and that Mozilla Firefox and Windows Live Messenger are running. Hovering over the active icons shows me a thumbnail view in real time of what’s happening with that window:
Using the new taskbar, the former Quick Launch Bar of previous Operating Systems is gone and now you pin applications near the Start menu. From my screen shot above, you couldn’t tell that I have Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and Firefox pinned and that Messenger just happens to be running.
Further to the right is the Notification Area. I’m not sure when this stopped being called the System Tray, but I’ve been told that I’ve been calling it by the wrong name (“System Tray”) for years. I’m not sure I’ll be able to permanently give up the habbit, but I’ll try to at least for this post 
.
The enhanced Notification Area now lets you pick and choose what icons to see there, and what should be hidden inside that little up arrow. You can see in my screen shot that I’m only showing the battery, the wireless network, and the sound. In this screen shot here you can see everything I’m hiding:
Using the customize link you can pick and choose, for each application, if you want to always see the icon, only see the icon when it’s notifying you of something, or never see the icon. You could also just elect to always show all icons regardless of the state that they’re in.
And finally, way over there hiding on the right is a vertical bar that just begs to be clicked over. This is the “Show Desktop” bar. Clicking this area immediately minimizes all active windows, clicking on it a second time will bring all your windows that were previously minimized right back up for you, and hovering over it will just temporarily show your desktop to you.
The same shortcut (Win+D) can still be used to hide the desktop and can also be used to bring back all those old icons. I think we can rename this button to the “boss bar”, since it’s probably what you’ll be going for when you hear the footsteps coming towards your cube!
2. The Family Pack License
As part of the Windows 7 suite of editions, Microsoft released a Family Pack option for Windows 7 Home Premium. The family pack offers you the ability to upgrade 3 computers in the same household and save off upgrading them all individually. As there are three computers here at my house, I purchased the Home Premium family pack and I’m $200 richer than I would have been otherwise.
3. Easy Access to System Uptime
I have labs full of computers in the office and I’m regularly needing to know their uptime for one reason or another. Sometime it’s to check if it’s been rebooted since a patch was applied and sometimes it’s to see if it’s been on too long and is probably leaking memory. I often also need to know the uptime of a customers computer so that I can tell if they really rebooted after installing that application or if they’re bluffing.
In the past I’ve used the Uptime utility form Microsoft that I think goes at least as far back as the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, and perhaps even earlier. With Windows 7, I can get this information directly from Task Manager. Just launch task manager, navigate to the Performance tab, and look at the Sytem group just past half way down the dialog box. The time is displayed as Days:Hours:Minutes:Seconds.
4. The Built-In Sticky Notes
This is one of those features that Microsoft has really just added as a nice-to-have. As an regular sticky user, both in the real and in the virtual world I’m sure that I’ll end up relying on these. Hopefully I can retrain myself a bit and stop saving 50 byte text files everytime I need to take a quick note.
5. The Built-In Snipping Tool
Yet another nice-to-have from Microsoft, the Snipping Tool allows you to basically take screen shots of the entire window, an entire application, or just a snip of your workspace somewhere. This could easily end up being a replacement for some of the more costly software out there. Infact, I used the snipping tool instead of my normal utility to capture all the images in this post.
My one complaint with the Snipping Tool is the minimal and seemingly unconfigurable delay between the time I click “New” button and when the tool starts the capture – it makes it difficult to capture things like right click context menus.
6. The Next Desktop Background Option
I get bored very easily with my desktop background and have used many third party applications (most recently DisplayFusion) to swap out my images pretty regularly. Windows 7 takes this a step further by allowing you to use themes or buckets or other pictures and then move through them at an interval.
Bored earlier with your background or just don’t feel like looking at the picture of the family right now? You can automatically move to the next image in line by right clicking your desktop and selecting Next Desktop Background Image.
7. Dragging Things to the Command Line Again
Ok, so this one is certainly one for my geek side, but losing the ability to drag things into a command window was a loss for many of us when we upgraded from Windows 2000/XP to Windows Vista. Microsoft advertised it as a security feature, but it was a major loss of functionality.
If you’ve never done it before and you’re a heavy command line user, it’s time to try it out. Basically, open a command line window and you can drag any of your applications, documents, shortcuts, etc right into it and the path of the application appears as if you’d typed it. Sure, you can do it with the Run line, but there are times when you just need to be working at a command prompt.
