Month: October 2009

With Windows 7, Microsoft made the first major change to the taskbar since it first appeared in Windows 95. The standard “taskbar box” that you’re familiar with is gone, replaced by an icon of the app(s) you’re using:

You can “pin” any app you’d like to the taskbar, so it will always be available. And big part of the new taskbar is “jumplists”, where you can add documents to the taskbar icons. If you add an icon for Remote Desktop to the taskbar, for instance, all of your previous connections will be displayed when you right-click on the icon, so connecting to \\WORKSERVER is as easy as right-clicking on the icon and then left-clicking on the \\WORKSERVER entry. Likewise, if you always use the same bunch of Word documents every day, you can pin Word to the taskbar and add those documents to the jumplist, so that opening DAILY_REPORT.DOCX is only a two-click process.

While all this is pretty neat, you might wonder what has happened to the standard  Restore, Minimize, Maximize and Close features that you used to get when right-clicking on a taskbar entry. You can get those back by holding down the SHIFT button when right-clicking on the taskbar icon. What’s more, Microsoft has added several new keyboard shortcuts when right-clicking on a taskbar icon:

SHIFT + Click – Opens a new instance
CTRL + SHIFT + Click – Opens a new instance under Admin
SHIFT+ Right-Click – Shows “Restore”, “Minimize”, etc. options
CTRL + Click – Cycles between windows in the group

Microsoft includes a “geographic” theme with every copy of Windows 7. American Windows 7 users, for example, can right-click on the desktop, choose “Personalize” and choose the “United States” theme, which includes several National Geographic-style wallpapers of some of America’s most majestic sites. Likewise, British users can choose the “United Kingdom” theme, and Australian users can choose the “Australia” theme.

Somehow or the other, Windows 7 is able to determine which country you’re in, and will only show that region’s theme by default in the “Personalize” UI. However, the rest of the themes are actually installed with every copy of Windows 7, and with one quick tweak you can use any theme you like:

1) In a Windows Explorer window, type or paste the following text, then press enter:

%WinDir%\Globalization\MCT

2) You will see several folders in the Explorer window. Click on “MCT-AU” for Australia, “MCT-CA” for Canada, “MCT-GB” for the UK , “MCT-US” for the United States, or “MCT-ZA” for South Africa.

3) Inside each country’s folder will be several folders. Click on the “Theme” folder, then click on the .theme file inside that folder to apply.

One of the most trivial (yet my most beloved) features of Windows 7 is the built-in ability to slide-show (shuffle) wallpapers.

The wallpaper chooser in Windows 7 looks much like the one in Windows Vista, except that when you hover your mouse over a wallpaper thumbnail in Windows 7, a checkbox appears on the image. You can therefore choose one (or more) wallpapers, then choose how often to change them, and whether you want them to be displayed in the order chosen, or shuffled. It’s a tiny little feature, but one that was long overdue in Windows.

What’s even cooler is that you don’t even have to use the Wallpaper applet to get the party started: you can also simply highlight a bunch of pictures in any Windows Explorer window, then right-click and choose “Set as Desktop Background”:

It’s really a nice little touch!

One of the biggest new features in Windows 7 are libraries, which are virtual folders which organize files of a certain type, regardless of their location on the hard drive. For example, one of the default libraries is Pictures, and you can tell Windows to search certain folders (or your entire hard drive) to find photos to add to the virtual Pictures folder.

While it’s a groovy new feature that I like, one thing I hate about it is that Microsoft decided to put it front and center with Windows Explorer. When you click on the “Windows Explorer” icon on the taskbar, the window displays your libraries instead of the standard hard drives you’re probably used to.

Fortunately, you can change this behavior back to the “old way” by simply editing a shortcut:

1) Close all open Windows Explorer windows.

2) Hold down the SHIFT key, right-click on the Explorer shortcut and choose “Properties”.

3) In the “Target:” box, paste the following text:

explorer.exe ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

4) To change the shortcut back to the default behavior, repeat steps 1 and 2 and paste the following text instead:

%windir%\explorer.exe