Windows 7 Tips, Tweaks, and Secrets (1 - 10)

Show the Windows Desktop with a new shortcut

If you’re anything like us, once you’ve installed a new operating system or bought a new PC, you start out organizing files and documents with the best of intentions. But before long your Windows Desktop becomes your de facto filing cabinet, peppered with shortcuts, frequently used spreadsheets, random photos, and abandoned detritus. The easy way to access that debris field to find something—the Windows key + D combination, which minimizes all Windows for a clear view of the desktop—is a helper that most of us know.

Windows 7, though, lets you bring up the desktop without taking your hand off your mouse or pointing device—but it’s not obvious how until you stumble upon it. In the extreme lower right portion of the screen, at the far-right edge of the taskbar, you’ll see a little vertical rectangle with a “glossy” finish. Hover the mouse pointer over it, and the Windows Desktop appears, letting you inspect it. (You’ll still see ghostly outlines of the windows you have open.) Move the mouse off the rectangle, and your windows reappear. You can also activate this via a keyboard shortcut: Windows key + spacebar.

Click on the rectangle, though (as opposed to hovering), and you’ll minimize all windows, allowing you to interact with the desktop, open folders, and the like. If you don’t open or maximize any new windows manually, clicking the rectangle a second time restores the view to the state it was in before you clicked.

Miss your old taskbar buttons? Revert ’em

For the first few weeks we spent with Windows 7, we stumbled around the new default taskbar like we were lost in a corn maze. Don’t get us wrong—we like most of the changes to it. But the big graphical icons signifying programs, as opposed to the horizontal-tiles-with-text that we were used to from Windows XP and Vista, made us think twice every time we approached the taskbar region. Was the app launched, or merely pinned to the taskbar?
We’re sure we’ll get the hang of the new taskbar yet, but in the meantime, we poked around and discovered that you can revert things to the way they used to be. (That’s comforting, since that can be said of so few things in life.)
Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties. This launches the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box. (We’ll be coming back to this box more than a few times in this story.) On the Taskbar tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu called Taskbar buttons. We've circled it here:

Windows 7’s default installation has this menu set at Always combine, hide labels. Change the setting to Combine when taskbar is full or Never combine, as you see fit. (Never combine prevents the taskbar from grouping a given program’s multiple windows together when the taskbar gets crowded.) Voila: You’ll see the familiar taskbar buttons of old, replete with text labels.

Install Control Panel submenus in the Start menu

If you’re any kind of PC tweaker, like we are, you spend way too much time inside the Windows Control Panel. One of the quibbles we’ve had with past versions of Windows was the several layers of clicks you’d have to negotiate to get into the depths of Control Panel—especially with the Category as opposed to Classic view of the panel that was the default with Vista.
In Windows 7, you can set up the OS to allow you direct access to individual Control Panel items straight from the Start menu. To set this up, right-click the Start button in the taskbar, and choose Properties from the resulting context menu. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box that pops up, click the Start Menu tab, then the Customize button. Under the subcategory named Control Panel on the ensuing screen, choose Display as a menu. It's here:

Now, when you click Control Panel in the Start menu, you’ll get a selection list that shows all the same Control Panel sub-items that you’d get if you launched the Control Panel into its own window. It looks like this:

 

 

Launch Web pages straight from the taskbar

If you’re an all-day Web user—constantly jumping online in the midst of other tasks—you probably do a frequent two-step you might call the IE Shuffle (substitute “Firefox,” “Opera,” or “Chrome,” if you’re so inclined): Find your open browser or its launch icon (perhaps buried behind open windows or sitting on the Windows Desktop somewhere), launch it or maximize it, and enter your destination address in the address bar.
Not exactly a terrible hardship, but Windows 7 can save you some steps by letting you install a miniature address bar right in the taskbar. When you type an address into it, it launches a browser window and goes directly to that site. Handy! It also works with the uber-useful browser shortcut domain-name-plus-Ctrl + Enter. So, for example, if you want to visit www.computershopper.com, you can type just computershopper in this mini-address bar, then press Ctrl + Enter. The browser will autofill the “www.” and the “.com,” just like it would in your main browser window.
The address-bar-in-the-taskbar isn’t active by default, though. To set it up, right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the now-familiar Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off Address, then hit OK. Here's the dialog box:

You’ll now see the miniature address bar in the taskbar. It looks like this:
 

Enter a Web address, and Windows 7 will launch a browser window, already headed to your Web destination. Of course, this is Microsoft here, so this works by default with Internet Explorer 8, assuming that IE8 is set as your default browser. If you want to use the taskbar address window with another browser, you’ll have to set that one as your default.

Access the Windows Desktop without minimizing anything

In the first tip, we showed you how to get to the Windows Desktop by hovering over or clicking on the new transparent zone in the lower-right corner of the screen—a.k.a., the Aero Peek feature. But perhaps you access your Windows Desktop constantly, or it contains lots of nested folders that are home to your everyday working files. You can get fast-click access to them from the taskbar without minimizing all your windows and losing your place.
You’ll have to set this up, though. Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off the Desktop button.

Hit OK, and a mini-menu called “Desktop” appears in the taskbar, followed by two angle brackets (>>). Click it, and you’ll see all of the items on your Windows Desktop, complete with nesting folders. Now it’s easy to access anything on your Windows Desktop without having to navigate back to it. Especially useful: The Computer entry in this menu lets you browse your PC’s entire drive-and-folder hierarchy from here (including any networked drives).

Open DOCX files without installing a converter (or Office 2007)

Unless you’ve updated your PC to Microsoft Office 2007 or Word 2007 (by no means a given, since earlier versions of Microsoft’s suite still work well for many folks), you might be confounded on occasion if you’re presented with a file with the DOCX extension. (DOCX is the native word-processing file format that the latest version of Word uses.)
Rather than fussing with and installing Microsoft’s Compatibility Packs, you can use Windows 7’s version of WordPad to open DOCX. To track down WordPad (it’s a bit buried, as usual), from the Start menu, go to All Programs > Accessories > WordPad. Once you're in WordPad, you can simply use the Open command to open a DOCX file:

This is a handy solution if you only encounter DOCX files once in a while. WordPad has semi-adopted the ribbon interface of the latest Office, so it might take some getting used to, but you should be able to save your DOCX document into a more amenable file format (including the earlier DOC format for Word files) without too much trouble. Most of the formatting should be maintained. (Puzzlingly, Windows 7 WordPad seems to be less competent at opening “original” DOC files, losing the formatting and peppering the files with header gibberish, in our tests. Hmmm.)

 

See full-size previews of open windows via taskbar thumbnails

If you’re a Windows Vista veteran, you’re familiar with the taskbar thumbnails feature—hover over an item in the taskbar, and you see a miniature version of that program’s window. (Sometimes the thumbnail is even live-animated, for example if you’re looking at a video window.) In Windows 7, these thumbnail previews are still around, but the new OS takes the preview a big step further, letting you see a full-size preview of the window without “committing” and clicking on it to make it active. That way, you can quickly check info on a buried-but-open window and immediately revert to the window you currently have active. In the sample picture below, we're hovering over the taskbar thumbnail and seeing a preview of the Internet Explorer page circled:

Though it’s easy, it’s not immediately apparent how to do this. Hover your cursor over the program’s taskbar icon, which brings up the thumbnail-size preview. Then move your mouse cursor to hover over the thumbnail preview itself. When you do, the relevant window will come to the fore, and all others will fade to the background. When you move the cursor off the thumbnail preview, your desktop window arrangement reverts to its previous state. And if you click on the thumbnail preview, you can bring that window to the front.
Incidentally, Windows 7 also lets you close the program window straight from the thumbnail, using the red “x” at upper right or by clicking the center button on your mouse—typically the scroll wheel, if it has one.

Select multiple items in Windows Explorer the easy way

It’s a familiar problem: You’re facing a folder full of MP3 files or vacation photos, and you want to copy out (or perhaps delete) only certain ones en masse. Everyone knows the old way: Hold down the Ctrl key while you click on each file with the mouse, highlighting the specific ones on which you want to take action. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all had it go wrong: Take your eye off it for a second, and you deselect (or select) the whole group. Time to start over again!
There’s an easier way in Windows 7, though you need to dig a bit to activate it. In a given folder, click on the Organize button at the top of the Windows Explorer window. Choose the Folder and search options entry from the menu that ensues, to launch the Folder Options dialog box. You’ll see three tabs; click the one called View. In the Advanced settings list that appears, scroll down and look for the entry Use check boxes to select items. Make sure it has, um, a check mark in it, then hit OK. We circled the appropriate option here:

In the relevant folder, if you’re looking at it in a file-thumbnail view, you’ll now see empty check boxes next to the files’ individual thumbnails. Otherwise, if you’re in a list or detail view, check boxes will appear if you hover your cursor just to the left of the line items, like they do here:

Check these boxes off, as desired, to select multiple files in a folder for mass action. It’s a lot more accurate and less nerve-wracking.

Make use of multiple flash drives or cards for a speed boost

One of the celebrated upgrades in Windows Vista was ReadyBoost, a handy technology that lets you make use of a USB flash drive or flash-memory card (such as an SD card) to serve as extra fast-access cache memory for frequently used files and data. (In essence, it serves the same purpose as cache on your hard drive, but the fact that solid-state memory is being used is a speed plus.) When you plugged in a USB key or flash card, you would be prompted whether you wanted to use it as storage, or as a supplement to speed up your PC.
The introduction of ReadyBoost coincided with the precipitous fall in price of flash media. With 4GB flash drives selling now for well under $20, most users own at least a few of these handy devices in various capacities. Why let yours sit idle when they’re not being used to store or transport files?
Windows 7 retains the ReadyBoost feature but adds support for multiple USB keys or flash cards used at once. So, if you have a few old 1GB keys around gathering dust, it can’t hurt to plug them in, so long as you have the USB ports to spare. When you plug in a key, Windows 7 will bring up a prompt asking whether you want to open the drive in Windows Explorer or use the drive to speed up your system. Choose the latter:

In the following screen, choose the Use this device radio button and adjust the memory slider below it to the amount you want to dedicate to ReadyBoost:

This won’t change the drive in any fundamental way; you can always unplug it and redeploy it for normal storage down the road, or use the unallocated portion for storage in parallel with ReadyBoost. Note, though, that the file system, even with 64-bit Windows 7, will keep you from accessing more than 4GB of the memory per key or card. So don’t expect to bulk up on cheap 8GB keys and go wild.

Fine-tune hard drive indexing for faster searches

We can’t emphasize enough the difference that a properly indexed drive or folder makes when you need to perform a search in Windows. If your PC is anything like ours—multiple hard drives, all containing loads of nested folders, some of them hosting thousands of data, photo, video, or audio files—a simple search for a particular MP3 file or Word document can feel like swimming in Jell-O.
Windows will index certain portions of your drives in the background during idle time, primarily e-mail and the files in your Windows-default library areas (Documents, and the like) but you can speed matters along by specifying which file types Windows should index. This is handled by a Control Panel item, Indexing Options. It’s not new (Vista had it as well), but it’s not much trafficked.
Visit this panel, and click the Advanced button. Then click the File Types tab. Here, you can examine which file types are being indexed, and to what extent. For each file type, you can designate to index the file’s properties alone, or both the properties and the actual content. That’s important—check your most frequently searched file types to ensure that the actual content is being indexed. You can find that selection here, in the circled area:

You can also designate which drives and folders are being indexed. Hit the Modify button, and you can specify which locations Windows 7 should index; make sure the ones where you’ll often conduct searches are designated. You can also tell the system to ignore certain huge drives or folders you know you’ll never need to search.