Windows 7 : 5 Useful Tips And Tricks

By Author: Stephanie
Total Articles: 8
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Windows 7 has introduced enhancements in many of its feature to fill the gap created by Windows Vista. These features are designed to help a user to improve his productivity. Windows 7 features are highly helpful to the end users and are packed with productivity secrets:

Jump lists

Microsoft did very intelligent thing by automatically grouping various instances of an open application under a single taskbar icon. But it got even smarter and helpful when it tied jump lists to those icons. Jump lists offers the user with a quick way to get to the documents you use generally.

Using jump lists is very simple: Just right-click an application icon on your taskbar, and Windows 7 would opens an organized list of the documents you work on most often in that application. The items in a jump list will vary by application. For Word, a list of frequently-used documents would be viewed by you. For Windows Explorer, you could see a list of frequently visited folder, and so on. Scroll your mouse over the list, and you'll see a thumbtack icon next ...
... to each item. Click the thumbtack to tack that item to the jump list so that it's always displayed.

Get menus back

Microsoft appears not to like usual menus any more. The company has eliminated them in Office 2007 in favor of the ribbon bar but in Windows 7 menus are hidden by default.

But if you want to get the menus back. Simply open the Start menu, and type "folder options." Click the Folder Options entry that appears. In the resulting Folder Options dialog box, choose the View tab, and then click the check box next to "Always show menus."

Get an energy report

Laptop users are always worried about every minute of battery life. If you are wondering what is eating up your battery reserve, Windows 7 has introduced a new tool that will hunt down the biggest battery abusers.

To make the use of it, just open the Start menu, and type "cmd." Then hit Enter. A command prompt window will open. At the prompt, type "powercfg - energy," and press Enter. Windows 7 will take only about a minute to assess the power consumption of all of the components in your computer and then publish a report to your hard drive. Open the report, and you'll be able to have a look to how to enhance the power consumption of your machine.

Customise the task bar

There are some new ways which allows you to customize the taskbar in Windows 7. To get to the customization panel, right-click the taskbar, and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. If the taskbar is taking up too much space on your system, click "Use small icons" in the Taskbar Appearance section. Check out the other taskbar customization options, while you are there. In Windows 7, this dialog box let you to determine which side of the screen the taskbar appears, and you can tell whether taskbar buttons should be joined when more than one instance of an application is running.

Zooming

Windows 7 rolls out with a little-known desktop magnification feature that is of great use for those times when you need to zoom in on an element on screen in order to view it better. At any time, just press the Windows key and tap the plus key (+), and Windows 7 will zoom the contents of the entire screen by 200 per cent. A magnifying glass icon would also appears on the screen. The level of magnification can be adjusted with it. Move your cursor to the edge of the screen to move the magnified area around. Press the Windows key and the minus key (-) to zoom back out.