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TechRadar’s 50 Seriously Useful Tips for Windows 7
Author: Editor // Category: Gadget Reviews, Tech Tips
If you got a copy of the Windows 7 beta, you may be wondering what changes there are in the experience for the average user. After all, at first glance it largely looks like just a new skin on a slightly leaner version of Vista.
But if you look closer, there’s all kinds of minor tweaks and new features that make Windows 7 more than the sum of its parts–not to say it’s a perfect operating system, just that you’ve got to do a little poking around to appreciate the extent of what’s different about it.
Fortunately Techradar.com has posted 50 short tips to take you on a walkthrough of many of the new features. From the most useful keyboard shortcuts to searching online media repositories to scheduling automatic downloads in Media Center, this is one of the handiest short tutorials on what’s new in Windows 7 that we’ve seen yet.
Some of our favorites:
And if a slideshow based on your standard wallpaper isn’t enough, then you can always create a theme that extracts images from an RSS feed. This isn’t fully implemented in the beta yet, but Long Zheng has created a few sample themes to illustrate how it works. And Jamie Thompson takes this even further, with a theme that always displays the latest BBC news and weather on your desktop.
28. Watch more videos
Windows Media Player 12 is a powerful program, but it still won’t play all the audio and video files you’ll find online. Fortunately the first freeware Windows 7 codecs package [shark007.net/win7codecs.html] has just been released, and installing it could get your troublesome multimedia files playing again.
44. Schedule Media Centre downloads
You can now tell Windows Media Centre to download data at a specific time, perhaps overnight, a useful way to prevent it sapping your bandwidth for the rest of the day. Launch Media Centre, go to Tasks > Settings > General > Automatic Download Options, and set the download start and stop times that you’d like it to use.”
Tags: media-center, windows, windows 7, windows tips, windows-media