DACS General Meeting
March 2011
Meeting Review:
Become a Windows 7 Power User

By Bruce Preston

At the March 1st General Meeting, Richard Corzo described and demonstrated many of the features in Windows 7 that in many opinions has made Windows 7 the best operating system that Microsoft has published.

Richard warmed up with eye-candy—features that while not critical to operating a computer certainly can go a long way to making it a pleasant experience. First he showed “Personalization”—adjusting the desktop theme, wall paper, and color schemes including the ‘Aero Glass’ option whereby items behind the current window can be seen through the current window’s frame. He included a visit to the Microsoft site that provides a wide selection of downloadable themes.

He then moved on to the Start Menu—and responded to the question “Where did everything go?” The W7 Start Menu is dynamic, W7 keeps track of the user’s activity and adjusts the items first offered based upon frequency of use. He pointed out that you may adjust how many items are retained, and you may also ‘pin’ an item such that it is always there. This pin capability showed up several times during the presentation—look for it behind the right-click. For example, you may pin documents to an application in the start menu—this is known as a jump list. Of course you can still get at all of your applications the old-fashioned way, just click on “All Programs” and the list appears as before, although on the left over the original list.

Two crowd pleasing features demonstrated were the “Aero Snap” feature and Win-Tab. Snap is a mechanism whereby dragging a window to a side edge of the desktop causes it to resize to half width. It is most useful when you snap two applications. I like to use it with Windows Explorer as one window can be focused on a source location and the other on a target folder location. It then becomes a simple matter to drag-and-drop files—much easier than the multi-click sequence of locate/copy/locate/paste etc. Win-Tab may be thought of as the running application Rolodex. Previous releases of Windows supported a pop-up window that showed the icons of running applications, but no hint as to what document was attached to the instance of the application. Using the combination of the Windows key and the Tab key now gives you the current window content of the application and you may scroll through them until you find the one of interest.

The optional “Quick Launch” toolbar has now been integrated into the Taskbar—via the mechanism of pinning.

“My Documents” has been re-designed, in that it replaces the catch-all “My Documents” with a collection known as Personal Folder for such things as Documents, Downloads, Music, Photos and Videos, etc., with the addition of Libraries. A library appears to be a folder, but it is actually a collection of links to folder(s) that could be on a shared location—another computer, file server, external drive or NAS (Network Attached Storage.) It is no longer necessary to remember where things are. This is especially useful in a home situation where you may share multi-media objects throughout the household.

But perhaps you don’t know even the name of something that you want—in that case the new improved Search functionality comes in. W7 indexes files such that search can find them quite rapidly. The search isn’t restricted to just all or part of the name of a file, it also is aware of the content of many file types, be it plain text or embedded such as within a spreadsheet or rich-text document. You may control what types of files the indexing mechanism examines. Search is also aware of application functionality—my first exposure to it was I needed to locate the administrative snap-in that configures data connections. I did a search on “configure odbc” and it immediately located the appropriate wizard.

Richard then continued to the far right of the task bar to what used to be called the “System Tray”—the location of the clock and all of those other mini-icons that appear like weeds whenever you install a program. This has been renamed to the “Notification Area” and now is intended to only display alerts as to change of conditions—arrival of an e-mail, announcement that updates are ready, WiFi availability, etc. The other less active items are still there, but they are relegated to being in a roll-up list that may be displayed by clicking a little chevron to the left. Again, if there is something that you really want to always be displayed, you may pin it.

W7 has dropped some of the applications that previously were bundled, such as Outlook Express, and replaced it with a suite of downloadable applications that are in the collection known as Windows Live. These applications are not Windows 7 specific; they run on Vista as well. The suite contains such things as Live Mail, Live Messenger, Live Photo Gallery, etc. One unspoken advantage of this is that they may be updated much more readily than if they were bundled with the OS.

Networking has been available since pre-Windows 95 starting with Windows 3.11 (also known as Windows for Workgroups) and has always been a bit of a black art to configure and maintain. Microsoft has recognized this and responded by creating multiple network profiles that configure the network connection based upon the location. The three profiles are: Home, Work, and Public. In simplistic terms a Home network permits essentially unrestricted access to resources between members of the group. The Work configuration is the classic permissions based sharing as most often seen in a business environment. Public is tightly clamped down, it essentially provides access to the Internet and that’s about it.

Richard responded to questions from the audience throughout the presentation, and had we not run into the hospital’s curfew we probably could have gone on for an additional hour. I heard an attendee ask “When are we going to have session 2?” and hope that the answer will be “Soon.”