Cool things discovered in Windows 7 (6801)

By tN0
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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tN0

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Hi, I just want to share those little things that really make a difference in Windows 7 or at least are very useful. The love to detail has made the new Office 2007 UI so successful and now we can see how this really helps Windows.

- One of the most useful features is the new Content View in Explorer. It is some kind of a list with large icons with as much properties as available:

- As you can see in the above screenshot there is now a tool tip while you are scrolling showing where you are (depending on how the view is sorted it shows the name, tag, date and so on)

- While you are typing in to move the cursor to the first item that starts with the letters you are typing in, the column header changes and shows now what you are typing so that you can correct your input:

- The Gadgets on the desktop now can be arranged on all 4 edges. The borders of the screen are some kind of magnetic. The really cool thing about this is, that if the display resolution changed (maybe because of a display driver installation or a full screen game) the gadgets will stay on the right places! :)

- As you may have seen, it is possible to switch a window to full screen by dragging it to the top and arrange it on one of a half screen by dragging it to the edges on the side. This is really a big thing! If you get used to it this really can't be underestimated! But there is more: Dragging or double clicking the top or bottom border of a window to the edge will scale it to the full hight of the screen. This is also some kind of a new full screen mode, double clicking the title bar will bring back the previous size:

- The new Media Player 12 is extremely fast and played every video I have tried. On Vista I needed to install a Codec pack and even then a lot of videos only worked with VLC player. The most usefull thing here is the new Now Playing state of the player. It opens almost instantly (!). While in full screen mode there is now a close button in the top right corner that really closes the player not only the full screen view.

- Win + "+" starts the new magnifier. If you click the magnifier icon, you can also invert all color.

Have you found more cool things?

Enthusiast

CoolShady2002

Posted
Posted

Some things I noticed:

- USB thumb drives now have a free/used space bar in windows explorer, like hard disks.

- New readyboost option: "Dedicate this device to readyboost" or something similar, sounds interesting.

- Dedicated next/previous playlist buttons in Windows Media Player.

Awesome Resource Monitor tool:

- See cpu usage for each service, not just it's host.

- Drill down into cpu/disk io by process. *

* Vista showed you io's by process, but you couldn't highlight a particular process, or see only io's/cpu by a particular process. At least not to my knowledge.

- If you're filtering by a process, it paints orange lines on the cpu and disk io graphs, to give you a visual representation of it's contribution to the resource usage.

- I like how the system tray icons are first added to a 'basket' where you can pick off the ones you want, rather than apps deciding they should be added.

- I like how you can see bucket id's for stop errors, not just for application crashes. I like little technical details like that. In Xp you had to install a seperate app for that and in vista it seemed non-existant.

probably much more i've yet to discover.

Enthusiast

CoolShady2002

Posted
Posted

Can't believe I forgot this:

- In the volume mixer, you can see the noise each individual application is making, not just the total noise coming out the speakers.

eg. You could see if it was windows media player or winamp making noise just by looking at the volume mixer.

Mentor

Y2Stu

Posted
Posted
Can't believe I forgot this:

- In the volume mixer, you can see the noise each individual application is making, not just the total noise coming out the speakers.

eg. You could see if it was windows media player or winamp making noise just by looking at the volume mixer.

thats in vista aswell

Grand Master

BajiRav

Posted
Posted
Can't believe I forgot this:

- In the volume mixer, you can see the noise each individual application is making, not just the total noise coming out the speakers.

eg. You could see if it was windows media player or winamp making noise just by looking at the volume mixer.

You didn't notice that in Vista? :huh:

Mentor

Electric Jolt

Posted
Posted
Can't believe I forgot this:

- In the volume mixer, you can see the noise each individual application is making, not just the total noise coming out the speakers.

eg. You could see if it was windows media player or winamp making noise just by looking at the volume mixer.

Windows Vista featured the volume mixer, you can click the volume icon then choose Mixer and it opens a small window in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you can see what is making all the noise that way. It has always been this way. I just looked at it, it is exactly like Windows Vista.

Mentor

Crackler

Posted
Posted

There's a video on Chan9 (?) about some of the new features added to the audio aspect of Windows 7. Some very cool things mentioned like automatic attenuation of sounds. :)

Edit: Here's the link: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Ins...o-capabilities/

Enthusiast

CoolShady2002

Posted
Posted

The volume mixer doesn't display individual application sounds for me in Vista, so I thought that was new.

I know it displays icons of apps that have made sounds, but doesn't show the bar that gives feedback for the noise they're making. (If any at the present time).

I'm wondering if maybe it's because of my cheap audio hardware.

I'm pretty sure i'm right about usb thumb sticks not showing percentage used space on Vista though, which it does on 7.

Rising Star

sharp65

Posted
Posted
cool. wen is the new build 6933 goin to be available? i want to play with the new taskbar

We most likely won't see the new taskbar until the public beta very late this year or early next year unless someone internally leaks the build. I'm kind of hoping it's the latter though :)

Grand Master

Brandon Live Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

Other cool things to try:

Win+Left and Win+Right hotkeys will snap a window to the screen edge.

Pressing Win+Right when a window is snapped to the right will move it to the next monitor in a multimon setup.

I think Win+Shift+Right will jump any window to the next monitor, etc.

Win+Up will maximize and Win+Down will restore.

Alt+P will show/hide the preview pane in Explorer.

Grand Master

Roger H. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted
Other cool things to try:

Win+Left and Win+Right hotkeys will snap a window to the screen edge.

Pressing Win+Right when a window is snapped to the right will move it to the next monitor in a multimon setup.

I think Win+Shift+Right will jump any window to the next monitor, etc.

Win+Up will maximize and Win+Down will restore.

Alt+P will show/hide the preview pane in Explorer.

WOW... cool! Win+Left/Right is really cool :)

Proficient

Grope for Luna

Posted
Posted
The volume mixer doesn't display individual application sounds for me in Vista, so I thought that was new.

I know it displays icons of apps that have made sounds, but doesn't show the bar that gives feedback for the noise they're making. (If any at the present time).

It doesn't show for me in Vista either. The individual controls work but there's no individual VU display for each app. I have an Audigy 4.

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