The Master List of New Windows 7 Shortcuts

s for switching between apps, moving windows around your screen, moving them to another monitor altogether, and much more. Here's a quick-reference master list of the best new Windows 7 shortcuts.

We're nuts for keyboard shortcuts here at Lifehacker, and Windows 7 brings a handful of great new ones to add to your muscle memory. It's also got a few handy mouse-based shortcuts you'd do well to add to your repertoire. So let's get shortcuttin'.

Window Management Shortcuts

One of the best changes in Windows 7 is the ability to "snap" windows to the side of the screen, maximize them by dragging to the top of the screen, or even move them to another monitor with a shortcut key. Check out the video for a demonstration of how some of the keys work.

The full list of keyboard shortcuts includes:

• Win+Home: Clear all but the active window.
• Win+Space: All windows become transparent so you can see through to the desktop.
• Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window.
• Shift+Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window vertically.
• Win+Down arrow: Minimize the window/Restore the window if it's maximized.
• Win+Left/Right arrows: Dock the window to each side of the monitor.
• Shift+Win+Left/Right arrows: Move the window to the monitor on the left or right.

You can also interact with windows by dragging them with the mouse:

• Drag window to the top: Maximize
• Drag window left/right: Dock the window to fill half of the screen.
• Shake window back/forth: Minimize everything but the current window.
• Double-Click Top Window Border (edge): Maximize window vertically.

Taskbar Shortcuts

In Windows 7, using the Windows key along with the numbers 1-9 will let you interact with the applications pinned to the taskbar in those positions – for example, the Windows key + 4 combination would launch Outlook in this example, or Win+Alt+4 can be used to get quick access to the Outlook Jump List from the keyboard.

You can use any of these shortcut combinations to launch the applications in their respective position on the taskbar, or more:

• Win+number (1-9): Starts the application pinned to the taskbar in that position, or switches to that program.
• Shift+Win+number (1-9): Starts a new instance of the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Ctrl+Win+number (1-9): Cycles through open windows for the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Alt+Win+number (1-9): Opens the Jump List for the application pinned to the taskbar.
• Win+T: Focus and scroll through items on the taskbar.
• Win+B: Focuses the System Tray icons

In addition, you can interact with the taskbar using your mouse and a modifier key:

• Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program or quickly open another instance of a program.
• Ctrl+Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program as an administrator.
• Shift+Right-click on a taskbar button: Show the window menu for the program (like XP does).
• Shift+Right-click on a grouped taskbar button: Show the window menu for the group.
• Ctrl+Click on a grouped taskbar button: Cycle through the windows of the group.

More Useful Hotkeys You Should Know

The new hotkey goodness didn't stop with the taskbar and moving windows around—one of the best new hotkeys in Windows 7 is the fact that you can create a new folder with a hotkey. Just open up any Windows Explorer window, hit the Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut key sequence, and you'll be rewarded with a shiny "New Folder" ready for you to rename.

Here's a few more interesting hotkeys for you:

• Ctrl+Shift+N: Creates a new folder in Windows Explorer.
• Alt+Up: Goes up a folder level in Windows Explorer.
• Alt+P: Toggles the preview pane in Windows Explorer.
• Shift+Right-Click on a file: Adds Copy as Path, which copies the path of a file to the clipboard.
• Shift+Right-Click on a file: Adds extra hidden items to the Send To menu.
• Shift+Right-Click on a folder: Adds Command Prompt Here, which lets you easily open a command prompt in that folder.
• Win+P: Adjust presentation settings for your display.
• Win+(+/-): Zoom in/out.
• Win+G: Cycle between the Windows Gadgets on your screen.

Windows 7 Slow - How to Speed Up Windows 7 Quickly and Easily

Is your Windows 7 slow? Wondering how to speed up Windows 7 without breaking the bank? Well I may be able to help you. But first off you need to make sure you are meeting the minimum hardware requirements to run Windows 7 on your system. Here they are:

• 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
• 1GB of main memory
• 16GB of available disk space
• Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
• A DVD-R/W drive

Keep in mind however, that if you were able to effectively run Windows XP or Vista, there should be little reason that you cannot also run Windows 7. The new Windows OS is designed to be very light and run quickly without requiring huge amounts of RAM or GHz's. Most folks having problems are the ones trying to jump from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.

If you meet or come close to these requirements and Windows 7 is still slow, then the issue lies somewhere else. For starters, cut down on the amount of programs running in the background. You can use MsConfig to do this or simple install software that will identify programs secretly running in the background and eating up loads of virtual memory.

The second option is to clean the Windows registry. This is perhaps the most effective means to speed up Windows 7. There is no internal cleaning tool to clear out errors and corrupt files from the registry. This contributes to significant congestion which will slow down Windows 7 significantly.

While these tweaks can be complicated to perform alone, you can scan your system with software which will fix these problems automatically. It will only take a couple minutes and you should notice a faster Windows 7 right away. Don't worry about compatibility issues, if the program can run on Vista it can run on Windows 7.

Tired of your sluggish computer? Do you wish it ran more like the hare and less like the tortoise? Did you know you can get your computer running like new with a simple free scan? Speed up your computer with the best registry cleaner on the market.

Jim Marshall is a computer technician expert with over 15 years in the industry. He has an intimate knowledge of the windows registry and various register repair software. After testing some of the top registry cleaners on the market, he has created a comprehensive review site that details his findings.

The Best Windows 7 Registry Tools

Windows 7 is the latest in a long line of Windows operating systems, and although it has a lot of new features... it still relies on the registry to function. The registry is a big part of Windows, but also causes a lot of problems. To fix it, you just need to use a registry cleaner... but with Windows7 being so new, which cleaners are the best for it?

Although there are a lot of registry cleaners out there, only a few them are able to work well on Windows 7. All registry cleaners have been designed to do the same job, which is to clean out the "registry database". The registry database is one of the most crucial parts of Windows, as it stores all sorts of personal information and settings, allowing Windows to "remember" many different things for your PC.

The registry was first introduced into Windows in Windows '98 but was quickly nicknamed the "Achilles Heel Of Windows" because it causes so many problems with the system. Unfortunately, Windows 7 still has these problems, and they are caused by the registry being accessed too much. Because the registry holds so much important information inside, it's constantly being opened and edited by Windows. Each day, 100's of registry files are being read by your PC... and this makes it confused, leading it to save many of them in the wrong way. This makes the files corrupt and incredibly difficult to read, making your computer run slower and with a lot of errors.

Registry cleaners fix this problem by scanning through the entire registry database and then fixing any of the problems that are inside there. However, because Windows 7 is so new, it's got a lot of new features and settings in the registry, which any registry cleaner will need to be able to identify. And the problem is that most cleaners are not intelligent enough to work with Windows 7 yet, leading them to try and delete many "healthy" parts of the registry, causing all sorts of damage to your PC. You need to be careful about these cleaners, and make sure that you use the best cleaner for your PC.

Having tested many of the most popular cleaners on the Internet, we've found that a few are able to fix the Windows 7 registry very well. And out of those, we've found that one cleaner called "RegAce" is actually the most effective. RegAce was only released at the start of 2009, and has been specifically designed for Windows 7, being equipped with some of the latest and most advanced scanning technology. It has an advanced scanning engine and a complete backup facility, which allow it to find and fix the most problems in the 7 registry.

Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard Speed Tests: Who Cares?

A couple of weeks ago, many Mac enthusiast sites ran pieces with headlines declaring that Snow Leopard was faster than Windows 7. The source for this news was CNET’s Dong Ngo, who ran a battery of tests designed to test gaming performance, media encoding time, battery life, and other attributes.

Ngo was fairly even-handed in his reporting. While noting that Snow Leopard beat out Windows 7 in many of the benchmarks, he also said that many of the poorer results (battery life in particular) were probably caused in part by unoptimized drivers on his test machine (a Mac). This makes sense, since Apple has said that official Windows 7 support for Boot Camp isn’t coming until later this year.

Of course, just because Ngo’s piece was fair doesn’t mean that everyone else was – most sites seemed perfectly willing to boil his report down to “Snow Leopard faster than Windows 7, buy a Mac.”

Now we’ve got people like PC Pro’s Chris Brennan claiming the opposite, that Windows 7 is in fact snappier than Snow Leopard, albeit without the benefit of benchmarks, charts and graphs. The Internet has only had a couple of days with this one, but rest assured that there will be headlines like “Windows 7 faster than Snow Leopard” floating around soon enough.

The problem with the people who write these follow-up pieces is that (1) they’re oversimplifying both Ngo’s and Brennan’s reporting and (2) they’re perpetuating an endless and pointless cycle, where Mac enthusiasts and Windows enthusiasts take endless stupid potshots at one another that don’t mean anything or add anything meaningful to the discussion.

I have trouble understanding why people invest themselves so personally in the Mac and Windows platforms. I suppose that choosing a computer is sometimes a way that people express themselves, like wearing a particular T-shirt or driving a particular car. Even so, trading insults on the Internet about whether to choose PC or Mac seems to me like a waste of time to me.

OS X and Windows are both good at different things, and so I’ll often switch back and forth between platforms depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. For example, no matter how fast Macs get, I don’t think they’ll ever make one that can open Word 2008 faster than any given 3-year-old PC can open Word 2007. Office is just faster on Windows.

Likewise, my experiences with editing video on Windows have all been horrible, soul-crushing, time-consuming, nightmarish ordeals that have left me a shell of the man I once was. If I’m going to stitch together some nice looking movies, I’ll go to the Mac every time.

If I’m interested in playing games that aren’t browser-based Flash games or 3D Chess, I’ll go to the PC. The back-and-forth could go on forever if I wanted it to.

My point is, so what if one OS is faster than the other OS at some tasks, or better than the other OS at some tasks? People need to remember that computers are tools, and not all tools are suited for all tasks. If my wrench won’t hammer in a nail, it’s not the wrench’s fault – I just need to go get a hammer and get on with my life.

How to Set Up Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows

windows 7 allows you to manage roles and features for remotely administered computers running Server 2008 R2, Server 2008, or Server 2003. If you require access to these servers you must download the tools from Microsoft and install them. These tools can only be installed on computers that are running Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional, or Ultimate editions.

To begin the installation option go to:

Download from Microsoft

The Next step is to get updates

Searching For Updates

This will permit Windows 7 to get the software updates necessary to load the Server Administration Tools.

Install the Updates

Select Yes from the option, and download the package.

Copying Packages

Now accept the license.

Read the License and Accept the Terms

That done, the updates will be installed.

Updates Are Installed

Finally, the tool installation update is complete.

Installation Complete

Now you are ready to configure the tools. Go to Start-> Control Panel.

From the menu select the Control Panel link

Next go to Programs

Select the Programs option

Select Programs and Features

Turn Windows Features on or off" width="400" height="206">

Programs- Features -> Turn Windows Features on or off

Select Remote Server Administration Tools

Select Remote Server Administration Tools

Expand the option.

Expand Remote Server Administration Tools and select the options you want to use.

When you install tools for specific roles, role services, and features within Administration Tools, you install only a set of snap-ins and tools for remote management of those roles, role services, and features installed on other computers.

Installing the administration tools does not install any roles or features on the local computer.

Evaluation Microsoft Windows 7

After the rather lackluster launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft is ready with another operating system that could succeed Windows XP in the true sense. While Windows Vista offered a flashy new interface, it failed to create a stir in the market due to its poor performance, compatibility goof ups and the lack of any impressive features. The new Windows 7 operating system, which is set to be launched on October 22, 2009, has been designed to fix the old and new annoying features of its immediate predecessor and the older versions.

Although impressive design has never been Microsoft's strength, the company has managed to improve tremendously on this aspect in the Windows 7 operating system. While users might take a while to get accustomed to the new Taskbar and Aero Peek of Windows 7, they will be pleased with the changes and the ease of use of this OS.

Windows 7 Operating System: What Has Been Discarded?
There are several capabilities and programs that were a part of Windows Vista are no longer present in Windows 7 versions. Some of the discarded items from a long list are:
Quick Launch: This feature had been the trademark of Windows XP and enabled a one-click access to programs. You could add any program to Quick Launch by dragging its icon to the Quick Launch toolbar. This distinctive feature has been eliminated from the Windows 7 versions.
Troubleshooting Warnings: Windows 7 has got rid of the onslaught of word-balloon warnings related to troubleshooting issues and potential security problems.

Windows 7 Beta: What's New or Improved?
Some of the new or improved features of the Windows 7 operating system are:
Taskbar: The Taskbar is unique to Windows and offers the Windows experience mainly through the Start menu and System Tray. While the Start menu got a much needed redesign in Vista, in Windows 7, the System Tray and the entire Taskbar get a complete makeover.
• The old small icons and text labels that appear for applications currently running on the system are replaced by larger, unlabeled icons in the new Taskbar. The new design reduces the clutter on the Taskbar.
• You also have the option of shrinking the icons and bringing the labels back if you feel uncomfortable. You can also reorganize the position of these icons in the Taskbar.
• The capabilities of Quick Launch have been included in the Taskbar of Microsoft Windows 7.
• The Live Preview feature of Windows Vista has been improved such that you can simultaneously view the thumbnails of all the running applications just by taking the pointer to an icon.
• A new feature called Jump Lists in Microsoft Windows 7 lets you perform several tasks within an application even if the application is closed. For example, you can open the browser, initiate an InPrivate stealth browsing session or visit any of the eight most frequently visited web pages by using the Jump List of Internet Explorer 8.
• You can view the Windows 7 screen (desktop) with one click, even if you have several open windows, by using the brand new feature called Aero Peek. This feature can be accessed by using the kind of nub at the extreme right edge of the Taskbar. If you hover your pointer to the nub, all windows become transparent, revealing the Windows 7 screen. You can access the applications and icons on the desktop by clicking the nub.

Windows 7 Compatibility
The requirements for the 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows 7 are similar to that of the premium editions of Vista. However, the Windows 7 compatibility requirements for the version built for the 64-bit processor are significantly higher than that for the 32-bit version.

32-bit processor 64-bit processor
Memory (RAM) 1 GB of RAM 2 GB of RAM
HDD free space 16 GB of available disk space 20 GB of available disk space

Apart from the RAM and HDD requirements, you must have a DVD drive (only to install from DVD/CD Media) and DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM driver model 1.0 to install Windows 7 versions.

Security - Windows 7
In Vista, the security - Windows feature, User Account Control (UAC), insistently prompted you to approve the running of applications or change systems settings in order to prevent rogue software from tampering with your PC. In Windows 7, you have more control over this irritating feature. You can alter your UAC settings to notify only when your Windows settings are being changed by software, instead of you.

Windows Upgrade Offers
Various companies are providing their customers with special offers for a Windows upgrade. For example, Acer has announced that customers who purchase a qualifying Windows Vista-based PC from June 26, 2009 to January 31, 2010 would be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 7 beta is far from being flawless. While some features do not seem fine tuned properly, others can not be utilized to their true capability without additional support from third party applications. However, the overall final shipping Windows 7 versions appear to be the worthy successor of Windows XP that Vista never was.

Upgrade to Windows 7 New Operating System Software

Windows 7 Slow? Speed Up Slowing Windows 7 With These Tips

Are you experiencing Windows 7 slow down? Do you want to speed it up? If so, then let's find out more about Windows 7 first.

Windows 7 is fast approaching. Microsoft verifies that they'll be launching Windows 7 next year. Currently, they are giving everyone a taste of Windows 7. They'll let you download the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) for free. This is used for Beta testing the product. And right now, many people are using it. You can also try it for yourself.

Why use Windows 7? If you're into something new, Windows 7 has lots to offer. Windows 7's taskbar is like no other. All you'll see on the taskbar is the icon of the application open. You'll also get more visual delights when you try flipping the windows opened. Also, Windows 7 is a lot faster than Vista, so you should really try it.

Before installing Windows 7 in your computer, make sure your computer meets the system requirements:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

If your computer meets the requirements, then there should be no problem installing it. But there are a lot of people who said that Windows 7 is slow. How can you fix this slow down problem? Let's find out.

One thing you can do to solve the Windows 7 slow down problem is to see if there are a lot of programs that runs automatically when Windows 7 starts up. This slows down your computer. Click start, then run and then type "msconfig". Press enter. Look for the list of startup programs. Remove those programs that you don't want to run on startup.

Another thing that you can do to solve the Windows 7 slow down problem is to clean the windows registry. You can download registry cleaners for Windows 7 on the internet.

Perhaps the best thing you can do to solve the slow down problem is to download and install the Process Explorer. This tool is a part of the Microsoft SysInternals package. This program will help you identify the programs running on your computer. It will even give a brief description of that program, so that you'll know which to remove. Remove the program by right clicking it, and then select "KILL". This program works just like the Task Manager, but gives you more information and has a better design.

After doing all these three methods, the Windows 7 slow down problem should be solved.

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor ‘Final version’ now available

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor ‘Final version’ now available by Microsoft

Microsoft have made available the final version of their upgrade advisor software for windows 7. You can download it here. The software, which I first saw a few weeks ago in beta, is an excellent tool for checking your hardware and software for compatibility.

In the case of my own PC (see below) it very accurately diagnosed that would and wouldn’t run in Windows 7.

The question I have to ask is why have they taken so long to release this tool? With previous versions of Windows the upgrade checker has been released some time before the launch of the OS, but this time it’s only two days before.

There can only be one answer to this, and it’s driver signing. Microsoft have been pushing software and hardware vendors hard in recent weeks to “Go Green” and make sure their stuff is fully compatible and tested with Windows 7.

Microsoft have been determined that Windows 7 will, out of the box, support a far greater range of hardware than any previous version of the OS. So it stands to reason they’ve been waiting for the vendors to green light their hardware.

How can they pre-sell an operating system without first releasing the tool that will tell people if their computer is capable of running it? The potential problems caused by incompatible software and hardware are exactly what got vistra so much bad press three years ago.

Anyway, if you have pre-ordered Windows 7 I’d recommend you download and run the upgrade checker now, it’s far more accurate than previous versions of the checker.