Mind blowing things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't

Mind blowing things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't

Shake them away

Ever had 10 Notepad, two Powerpoint and 50 Outlook windows open? Want to minimize all of them except the most important one? In Windows 7, you can grab the top of the window and shake it about to scare away all of the other open windows. Simple.

A step forward in previewing

In Vista, hovering over a minimized window on the taskbar would provide a preview of the window. In Windows 7, a similar preview pops up which also gives the option to close a window (within the preview), along with a full-size 'peek'. You can also press "Win" + "T" to scroll along previews in the task-bar.

           A smaller preview, along with a full-size 'peek' with the ability to close the window

Snap into place

Simply drag your window to the left or right edge of the desktop to snap and resize the window to one half of the screen. Drag the window to the top to maximize it. A pretty neat idea made neater by the use of the keyboard shortcuts ("Win" + respective arrow keys). No longer do you have to frustratingly position the mouse at the edge of the window to resize it.

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Technology update- UEFI

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) served as the OS-firmware interface for the original PC-XT and PC-AT computers. BIOS has however not been completely modernized even with the advancement of the PC market and technology. The Unified EFI (UEFI) specification (previously known as the EFI specification) defines a similar interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is independent of the processor architecture and it defines a similar OS-firmware interface, known as "boot services" and "runtime services".

As per Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum ,UEFI is expected to predominate in new PCs by 2011.

UEFI is free from architectures limitation, as the technology scales across platforms (server, desktops, mobiles, handhelds). 

For the users' perspective, the advantages of UEFI machines include fast boots (less than 5 seconds) as well and resume response. They could feature a high-resolution Graphics User Interface in pre-boot environment and the systems will be able to boot from large (2.2TB or higher) disks. In addition, Users may also be able to access Outlook data in seconds even when their notebook is off. 

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Process Explorer utility

Task manager is less elaborate in providing information and details on processes.

However, there's a very good utility called as Process Explorer, that simplifies the process and provides you a tree based format viewing.

This utility becomes useful in looking at the CPU usage, tracking the processes and malwares. 

Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows.

The top window always shows a list of the active processes, including their owning accounts. The  bottom window  information is dependent on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you'll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you'll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. 

Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

It can thereby help in tracking down DLL-version problems and serve as a handy and intuitive tool to provide a good idea and information into the way Windows and applications work.




 

Download Process Explorer (1.64 MB)

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