MSDN Blog - 30 Win 7 Secrets

[Scotteq]

Full Credit to Spr07 at http://www.sevenforums.com who was kind enough to post the link to this very useful Blog:


http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

For now, though, I want to focus in on some of “secrets” of Windows 7: the many little tweaks and enhancements that we’ve made in this release that I’ve discovered and collated over the last few months of using Windows 7 across my home and work machines. These are the things that are too small to appear in any marketing document as “features”, but that you quickly miss when you switch to an older version of Windows. There are some who think that we’re arbitrarily hiding functionality to make Windows easy for casual users, but I’d argue that a great deal of effort has been put into this release to satisfy power users. In homage to those of us who enjoy discovering the nooks and crannies of a new operating system list, I’ve put together the longest blog post that I’ve ever written. If you’ve downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta recently, I think you’ll enjoy this list of my thirty favorite secrets. Have fun!

Yes, it was written by a MicroSerf... But once you get past the excess enthusiasm, a lot of this stuff is the little things that make the OS usable.

 

[Shadow703793]

My favourite:

The Black Box Recorder. Every developer wishes there was a way that an end-users could quickly and simply record a repro for the problem that they’re running into that is unique to their machine. Windows 7 comes to the rescue! Part of the in-built diagnostic tools that we use internally to send feedback on the product, the Problem Steps Recorder provides a simple screen capture tool that enables you to record a series of actions. Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps. It’s a really neat little tool and I can’t wait for it to become ubiquitous on every desktop! The program is called psr.exe; you can also search for it from Control Panel under “Record steps to reproduce a problem”.

Quite useful.

 

[fulle]

Thanks for the link.

I found quite a bit of it useful, on the new shortcuts in particular... and it was nice to find a fix so that MSN messenger won't dock to the taskbar, and go live in the system try where it belongs (tip 28).

On a related note: lol @ the "Siamese fighting fish". A fitting background, IMHO. In more ways than one.