Windows 7 Helps Me Be More Productive
Posted in Review on June 18th, 2010 by skylercall – Be the first to commentForgive me if this is all old news to you. I skipped over Windows Vista so I am not aware if these features are new as of Windows 7 or just new since Windows XP. Also, I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit. Some of these features may not be available in Home or Home Premium editions.
Sticky Notes
With Windows XP, throughout the day, I would accumulate many instances of Notepad; each with different notes taken from phone calls, assignments given to me by others in the office, or just little tasks that I did not want to forget. Having so many instances of Notepad open all at once would clutter up the taskbar and also the Alt+Tab window making it more confusing and time-consuming to navigate from one window to another. When it came time to restart my computer for whatever reason I first had to go through all the Notepad instances and save them to my desktop. If my computer ever shutdown unexpectedly due to a crash or power-loss I lost all my unsaved notes from that day.
After installing Windows 7 on my new computer I was quite happy to see a program called Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes solves all the problems I had experienced previously by using Notepad to log all of my notes. The individual notes even grow automatically as I type more and more text in them. If they get too big for my liking I can then make them smaller again and a scrollbar appears. You can also change the color of each note if you wish. The only feature I miss is the ability to change the font size. Sometimes only two words fit on one line before the next gets pushed down which isn’t aesthetically pleasing.
Full Date Displayed in Taskbar
This may sound like something unimportant but I am horrible at keeping track of the current date. I am always amazed when others can easily predict what day of the week some future date will fall on. In Windows XP, unless you make your taskbar at least twice as tall as the default size or move it over to one of the left or right side of your monitor you can only see the time. To see the date you have to hover your mouse over and wait for the tooltip to pop up showing the date (which oddly doesn’t always work) or you have to double click on the clock to open up the Date and Time Properties window which comes with its own problems. Have you ever spent a moment browsing the calendar and then accidentally clicked OK instead of Cancel? The system date changes!
Now with Windows 7 I can see the full date without moving my mouse. If I want to browse the calendar I click it an up pops a non-destructive, read-only calendar! If I absolutely want to change my system date (which I’ve never wanted to do before but I suppose is necessary for computers that don’t have access to the internet for an NTP server) I first have to click ‘Change date and time settings…’.
Pin Programs to Taskbar
Access to my favorite and most-used programs is now only one mouse click away thanks to the ‘Pin this program to taskbar’ feature. Now if only Microsoft would allow me to pin a folder to it without using a silly hack!
And finally, I am allowed to reorder the position of the open applications shown in the taskbar! Yay!
Better Navigation in Windows Explorer
This one is a bit difficult for me to explain. When I first started navigating in Windows Explorer I panicked when I couldn’t find the Up button to jump to the parent folder (Yes, I know. There is a Back button but back isn’t always up!) but then I found something better. There is an ant trail at the top where you can click on any parent folder. Even better is that each parent folder has an arrow next to it that when clicked drops down to give you access to any of its sub folders. This makes moving around much quicker.
Configure Schedule in Disk Defragmenter
Keeping my hard drives fragment-free, optimized for speed and efficiency, is now easier with Windows 7. Back in Windows XP I had to setup a custom Scheduled Task to run Disk Defragmenter on a schedule. Now, setting up the same schedule is easily done using the native Configure Schedule tool within Disk Defragmenter. Click ‘Configure Schedule’, set the frequency, the time of day, and you are done!
Snipping Tool
How do you think I got all the nice screenshots for this post? Capturing part of the screen used to mean taking a screenshot, pasting it in Microsoft Paint, saving it, opening the saved image in Adobe Photoshop, cropping it, and saving the final image! That is a lot of steps. So many, that I often avoided providing a screenshot.
Now, with Windows 7 I have Snipping Tool! Snipping Tool allows me to draw a box around an area of the screen and click save. It is that easy! If you don’t want to draw a rectangle you can use the other snip types, Free-form Snip, Window Snip, and Full-screen Snip. After capturing an image you can draw on it or use a highlighter before saving it. My only complaint is that I haven’t found a way to get a shot of something that requires control of the mouse to display such as tooltips, drop-down meus, and right-click menus. I also couldn’t figure out how to get a snip of the tool itself to show you here. Yes, I could open up Paint and then Photoshop but who does that anymore!
