By Chris J Holgate (Contributed)

I’ve been living with Windows 7 for a good few months now and in that time have discovered a couple of little ‘hidden gems’ which I wanted to share with you:

Aero Shake – In Windows 7, when you click on the title bar of any window and shake it every other open window gets minimised straight back in to your taskbar, reducing clutter on your screen. This allows you to focus on the one window and then when ready shake it again and the other windows will reappear.

Additional Aero features include Aero Snap which allows you to quickly and easily rearrange your desktop by placing any open window to the left, right or top of your screen and Aero Peek which allows you to immediately see what an application is doing by hovering over the icon in the task bar.

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Sticky Notes – Proof, if needed, that some of the simplest applications make the largest differences to the end user experience. One of the most commonly used applications on my PC used to be the incredibly simple ‘notepad’ as I find that my working life works a lot better if I simplify everything down in to lists.

Rather than jotting notes on random pieces of paper that will almost certainly get lost throughout the day I used to dump everything in notepad and ensure that every line was eventually cleared so I was left with a blank page before I went home.

Sticky notes is similar to notepad but makes the organisation a little easier and more logical. Simply click on the Windows start menu and type sticky to begin typing notes. Then, when complete you can either minimise or close the application to get back to your work. When you reopen Sticky Notes, the tasks will be present exactly as they were left. Notes can be easily deleted with one click of the mouse.

Improved Calculator – Windows 7 calculator has improved considerably; now rather than being an arithmetic only affair, it can be operated in four modes – Standard, Scientific, Programmer and Statistical. It can also perform unit conversion, for example grams to ounces, metres to feet and Celsius to Fahrenheit along with a couple of unexpected features such as the ability to calculate the number of days between two dates or the value of your mortgage repayment. Surely in the next version of Windows the calculator application will finally gain graphical capabilities.

Windows Disk Image Burner – For some time now the preferred method of copying and storing CD’s and DVD’s has been by using an ISO file; a single image which includes the contents of an entire disk. Reading these files used to require a specific application (the likes of which I’ve covered previously in Click) but every version of Windows 7 now includes support for these straight out the box; simply double click on the ISO file that you wish to burn, insert a blank CD or DVD and you’re done.

Chris Holgate is a director and copyrighter of the Inkjet and Toner Cartridge site [http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk]

He writes a weekly article on all things tech related.

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