List of Windows 7 Secrets, Tips & Tweaks.

[HappyAndyK]

Tim Sneath of Microsoft has put together a great list of Windows 7 Secrets.



Here is an example :

The Widescreen Tip. Almost every display sold these days is widescreen, whether you’re buying a notebook computer or a monitor. While it might be great for watching DVDs, when you’re trying to get work done it can sometimes feel like you’re a little squeezed for vertical space.

As a result, the first thing I do when I set up any new computer is to dock the taskbar to the left hand side of the screen. I can understand why we don’t set this by default – can you imagine the complaints from enterprise IT departments who have to retrain all their staff – but there’s no reason why you as a power user should have to suffer from default settings introduced when the average screen resolution was 800x600.

In the past, Windows did an indifferent job of supporting “side dockers” like myself. Sure, you could move the taskbar, but it felt like an afterthought – the gradients would be wrong, the Start menu had a few idiosyncrasies, and you’d feel like something of a second-class citizen. The Windows 7 taskbar feels almost as if it was designed with vertical mode as the default – the icons work well on the side of the screen, shortcuts like the Win+T trick mentioned previously automatically switch from left/right arrows to up/down arrows, and so on. The net effect is that you wind up with a much better proportioned working space.

Try it – in particular, if you’ve got a netbook computer that has a 1024x600 display, you’ll immediately appreciate the extra space for browsing the Internet. For the first day you’ll feel a little out of sync, but then I guarantee you’ll become an enthusiastic convert!

For more click MSDN Blogs.

Let me know if you figure out Tip # 29

[tweakwindows]

^Thanks for the link.

Btw, here is the answer for tip # 29:

Fact is that, with the inclusion of the selectively breded betta in Windows 7 Beta, Microsoft is hinting that the previous Milestone releases of the platform were just the native versions of the fish. Yet, at the same time, Milestone 1, M2 and M3 of Windows 7 were much more Windows Vista than the next iteration of the Windows client. The inclusion of the betta fish in Windows 7 Betta is accompanying the evolution process from Vista to Win 7, as Microsoft is doing a tad of “selective breeding” of its own.

There is no telling, at this point in time, whether the Redmond company will continue to feature the Windows 7 betta fish wallpaper into the operating system moving forward to the next development milestone, or if the specimen will end up out of water. Should users expect an RC (release candidate) fish next? Or maybe even a gold fish for the RTM (gold) edition of Windows 7?

Source-Softpedia

[HappyAndyK]

Hey thanks for the cool piece of info! More on Betta - The Siamese fighting fish at Wikipedia.

[Mikey]

Sounds very interesting to me. First Beta fish, now what could be next?

[whs]

I found this passage most interesting:

"It’s also worth noting in passing that Windows 7 is far better suited to a netbook than any previous operating system: it has a much lighter hard drive and memory footprint than Windows Vista, while also being able to optimize for solid state drives (for example, it switches off disk defragmentation since random read access is as fast as sequential read access, and it handles file deletions differently to minimize wear on the solid state drive)."
This implies that we are going to get netbooks with W7. I can't wait. Great for travel, especially with an SSD - nothing can break easily.