Today sees the general release of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7. I have been using the beta for sometime now and i’ve been very impressed from the start. Now you may have already heard a lot about the new features of Windows 7, especially the touch screen technology, but most of us do not have touch screen monitors. What about the features that will help us every day users the most? Well this post is about all the little features that make just every day computing much easier.

The New Taskbar

The first thing you will notice about Windows 7 is the brand new taskbar layout. If you are like me then you may have been a bit wary at first over this. We are all so used to the taskbar from old versions that we might find it hard to adapt to the new one but this is not the case. I found myself gettting used to the taskbar very quickly and it is certainly an improvement over the old one. I like my computer looking tidy but I also like having lots of things open and quickly at hand. The new taskbar makes all of these possible. Programs can be pinned to the start menu so they can be easily accessed. A little box appears around the pinned programs when they are open so you can easily tell which is being used or not.

By left clicking a program you will bring it to the front it as normal, unless you have multiple windows open. Thie picture picture on the left shows my web browser with two windows open that i’ve left clicked on once. It shows previews of both windows. I can hover over the preview to view it and I can click it to bring it to the front. You can also do this without left clicking. Just by hovering over a program’s icon on the taskbar you can get the small previews up, even if the program only has one window open.

Right clicking an open program on the taskbar also brings up a nice feature. With most programs you will be treated to a list of your most recently opened files from this program. In the picture you can see the last few tracks that I listened to in my music player. In web browsers it will bring up your last viewed web pages. Just like in the taskbar you can pin files or web pages here so you can easily access your most used or viewed files. By right clicking you can also choose to pin or unpin the program itself from the taskbar and you can also close it from here too.

Another nice little feature is that different program icons glow different colours when you hover over them. Thunderbird for example glows blue and firefox glows orange.

Start Menu

The start menu hasn’t changed too much from Vista. You may notice that recent files has gone which at first is a disappointment but thanks to pinning you wont need recent files no more. The start menu can be used in the same way as the taskbar and I use it for my less frequent programs and files. I have pinned microsoft excel for example and when I click the little arrow next to excel I am shown a menu with my most recently used excel files, to which I have pinned my business accounts file. This file is usually updated every day or two and not everytime I use my computer so I keep it here as it is easy to get to without being on the taskbar. Another nice feature is the much quicker search box at the bottom which can also be used to execute commands in the same way as the run command does.

Snipping Tool

If you are writing a blog on Windows 7 using screenshots then the snipping tool is just fantastic. In fact if you are someone who used the print screen button a lot you will find yourself using the snipping tool instead. What the snipping tool does is it allows you to drag a box over any part of your screen and when you’re done it will take what’s in the box and turn it into an image. You can save it or mail it in just a click. It’s a really handy tool.

Snap

Snap is a great tool if you need to look at two windows side by side. Instead of spending ages resizing two windows you can now just snap each on to the edge. One way of doing this is by dragging each one to the egde of the screen. You will see an outline of a box appear that’s half the size of the screen. By releasing your mouse the window will then fill this half of the screen where the box outline was. I’ve found a much easier way to to this is by pressing the windows button and the left or right arrow key when viewing a window. This tool is especially handy for when web designing as I can have the code or ftp program one side and the web browser the other.

Paint/Image Editing

Not really much of a new feature or improvement here but there are a couple of small changes that I like. The image editing has been kept seperate from the viewer unlike in Vista where they were together but there are now more things you can do when image editing. By right clicking and pressing edit, the image will be opened in paint. Paint has got slightly better over the last few editions of Windows. It is now possible to crop and resize images much easier, which were both key features that paint really lacked. I always used to find myself opening up Fireworks just to resize an image but I no longer need to. However that said there are not any other features to paint that are that useful to image editing but for me I am glad these two basic features are finally included and very easy to use. There is one draw back here though. When you could edit an image in the Vista picture viewer you could use auto levels to ajust the colour and contrast and you had red eye reduction. This are not available in paint which is a shame.

There are plenty more features in Windows 7, in fact there is a 140 page document that contains them all, but these are the main ones for me. Overall it is definatly the best operating system from Microsoft. It is faster than Vista as it uses much less resources which was the major downfall of Vista. I think that XP users will be swayed to use it and they will like it. With the touch and speech technology built into it we could see the way we use computers change over the next few years.