Windows 7

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Bird Brain

New Member
Im quite impressed so far,seems stable and starts up faster than my previous installation XP.No blue screens yet.

Hard to find the way around though.I really must read the instructions.

Any hints,tips or tricks?

Cheers.
 
I am liking it, but as I went through a year or so of Vista, the change wasn't as steep as it would be directly from XP.
But then again, once they had sorted out the initial Vista problems I liked that too.

In reality, Windows 7 is only Vista with out the initial bugs. :rolleyes:

Big tip: learn to type into the start menu search box. E.g. type 'not' and it will quickly list Notepad and every other thing that starts with 'Not'. Is generally a lot quicker and easier than tring to find stuff in the sub menus
 
OP
OP
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Bird Brain

New Member
I have found two programs down work,Zone Alarm and Symantic Antivirus Corporate.

I have AVG but no firewall answer yet apart from Windows Firewall.

I did have a spell with Vista and was surprised how similar Windows 7 is to Vista.

More of a honeymoon period this time with Windows 7 compared to Vista.I've had it two days now.

Thanks for the tip. :tongue:
 
Any hints,tips or tricks?

Task manager is best got to by right-click on the bottom of your screen (the bar which shows what programs are open, I forget its name) and selecting it, cntrl-alt-del gets you to the login screen (sortof)

Some programs which need to access the C drive won't be able to unless you run them as administrator. Right click and select 'run as administrator'. Older programs might not know that it's Windows preventing them writing a file to whereever they want, so you can come across some odd error messages.
 

rh100

Well-Known Member
I have found two programs down work,Zone Alarm and Symantic Antivirus Corporate.

I have AVG but no firewall answer yet apart from Windows Firewall.

I did have a spell with Vista and was surprised how similar Windows 7 is to Vista.

More of a honeymoon period this time with Windows 7 compared to Vista.I've had it two days now.

Thanks for the tip. :tongue:

It's unwise to run older versions of things like security products or disk management products on newer versions of windows unless it's been written or patched for that specific version. But most other things should be ok to try out.

A couple more tips - drag the window to the left or right and it should resize to half the screen - do same for another window to the other side and it's a good way of resizing two doc's side by side - I think it works for top and bottom aswell. IIRC if you click to drag a window and shake it it resizes - or is that Ubuntu I'm thinking of???

Another thing is the Aero interface/desktop theme - present since Vista. Aero uses hardware acceleration - so if you have a dedicated graphics card then be sure to enable Aero. You get all the pretty effects but the video card takes the load off the CPU so should result in it being quicker than having all the bells and whistles turned off like you would in XP to try to make it quicker. Anyone else ever tested this out?


I'm not sure what went wrong with Vista, once it was stable it seemed ok - perhaps just driver issues, I imagine 7 has benefited from the drivers for Vista being available. Also Vista came with the User Access Control which was a great way to prevent rogue apps but pee'd people off who didn't really understand its purpose (and could be turned off), seems to be toned down a bit in 7.
 

rh100

Well-Known Member
Also, with Aero enabled, instead of Alt-Tab to switch windows - use Windows Key-Tab to see a 3d version.

I've just read that the click and shake thing minimizes all other apps. Also clicking the little box to the right of the clock on the taskbar will show the desktop, XP used to have it's own icon for that on the left if quick launch was enabled
 

Norm

Guest
Task manager is best got to by right-click on the bottom of your screen (the bar which shows what programs are open, I forget its name) and selecting it, cntrl-alt-del gets you to the login screen (sortof)
Better still, IMO, is ctrl-shift-esc :thumbsup:
 
A couple more tips - drag the window to the left or right and it should resize to half the screen - do same for another window to the other side and it's a good way of resizing two doc's side by side - I think it works for top and bottom aswell. IIRC if you click to drag a window and shake it it resizes - or is that Ubuntu I'm thinking of???

"windows" key + left / right arrow does the same, windows + up does maximise
 

Gerry Attrick

Lincolnshire Mountain Rescue Consultant
Try this tip. Embedded in W7 is a short cut to almost everything that can be tweaked or adjusted. It is called "God Mode". To create a desktop shortcut to it, right click on the desltop and left click "new". On the sub menu, left click "Folder".

This creates a new folder on your destop. Rename said folder the following: "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" without the parentheses. You must use the curly brackets.

Voila, your folder icon changes to a computer monitor. Double click on it and a wealth of settings and adjustments are displayed.
 
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