Windows 7: The Black Book (Windows 7 Help Series 1)

3 days ago Currently on Windows 7 and worried Windows 10 is a change too far? with Windows 10 however, such as lack of DVD playback support.
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All other windows will minimize, while the window the user shook stays active on the screen. Use when you have many open windows on your desktop. This feature will minimize all windows except the one you shake. Click and hold on the title bar of the window you need open and shake the mouse. The window you shake will maximize and all others will be minimized. To restore all windows, shake the mouse again whilst holding on to the title bar of the open window. A variety of new keyboard shortcuts have been introduced.

The user interface for font management has been overhauled in Windows 7. As with Windows Vista, the collection of installed fonts is displayed in a Windows Explorer window, but fonts that originate from the same font family appear as icons that are represented as stacks that display font previews within the interface. Windows 7 also introduces the option to hide installed fonts; certain fonts are automatically removed from view based on a user's regional settings. Hidden fonts remain installed but are not enumerated when an application asks for a list of available fonts, thus reducing the amount of fonts to scroll through within the interface and also reducing memory usage.

The dialog box for fonts in Windows 7 has also been updated to display font previews within the interface, which allows users to preview fonts before selecting them. Previous versions of windows only displayed the name of the font. The ClearType Text Tuner which was previously available as a Microsoft Powertoy for earlier Windows versions has been integrated into, and updated for Windows 7. Microsoft would later backport Windows 8 Emoji features to Windows 7. There are two major new user interface components for device management in Windows 7, "Devices and Printers" and "Device Stage". Both of these are integrated with Windows Explorer, and together provide a simplified view of what devices are connected to the computer, and what capabilities they support.

Windows 10 Basics

Devices and Printers is a new Control Panel interface that is directly accessible from the Start menu. Unlike the Device Manager Control Panel applet, which is still present, the icons shown on the Devices and Printers screen are limited to components of the system that a non-expert user will recognize as plug-in devices. For example, an external monitor connected to the system will be displayed as a device, but the internal monitor on a laptop will not.

Device-specific features are available through the context menu for each device; an external monitor's context menu, for example, provides a link to the "Display Settings" control panel. This new Control Panel applet also replaces the "Printers" window in prior versions of Windows; common printer operations such as setting the default printer, installing or removing printers, and configuring properties such as paper size are done through this control panel. Windows 7 and Server R2 introduce print driver isolation, which improves the reliability of the print spooler by running printer drivers in a separate process to the spooler service.

If a third party print driver fails while isolated, it does not impact other drivers or the print spooler service. Device Stage provides a centralized location for an externally connected multi-function device to present its functionality to the user. When a device such as a portable music player is connected to the system, the device appears as an icon on the task bar, as well as in Windows Explorer. Windows 7 ships with high-resolution images of a number of popular devices, and is capable of connecting to the Internet to download images of devices it doesn't recognize.

Opening the icon presents a window that displays actions relevant to that device. Screenshots of the technology presented by Microsoft suggest that a mobile phone could offer options for two-way synchronization, configuring ring-tones, copying pictures and videos, managing the device in Windows Media Player , and using Windows Explorer to navigate through the device.

The actual per-device functionality is defined via XML files that are downloaded when the device is first connected to the computer, or are provided by the manufacturer on an installation disc. Hilton Locke, who worked on the Tablet PC team at Microsoft, reported on December 11, that Windows 7 will have new touch features on devices supporting multi-touch. An overview and demonstration of the multi-touch capabilities, including a virtual piano program, a mapping and directions program and a touch-aware version of Microsoft Paint , was given at the All Things Digital Conference on May 27, ; a video of the multi-touch capabilities was made available on the web later the same day.

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Windows 7 introduces native support for sensors, including accelerometer sensors, ambient light sensors, and location-based sensors; [47] the operating system also provides a unified driver model for sensor devices. Because data acquired by some sensors can be considered personally identifiable information , all sensors are disabled by default in Windows 7, and an account in Windows 7 requires administrative permissions to enable a sensor.

Sensors also require user consent to share location data. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 is able to report when a laptop battery is in need of a replacement. The operating system works with design capabilities present in modern laptop batteries to report this information.

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The powercfg command enables the customization of the hibernation file size. The operating system also compresses the contents of memory during the hibernate process to minimize the possibility that the contents exceeds the default size of the hibernation file. With a video driver conforming to Windows Display Driver Model v1. This allows DWM to use significantly lower amounts of system memory, which do not grow regardless of how many windows are opened, like it was in Windows Vista.

The Desktop Window Manager in Windows 7 also adds support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards from different vendors. Each user of Windows 7 and Server R2 has individual DPI settings, rather than the machine having a single setting as in previous versions of Windows.

DPI settings can be changed by logging on and off, without needing to restart. Over time, several technologies have been incorporated into subsequent versions of Windows to improve the performance of the operating system on traditional hard disk drives HDD with rotating platters. Since Solid state drives SSD differ from mechanical HDDs in some key areas no moving parts, write amplification , limited number of erase cycles allowed for reliable operation , it is beneficial to disable certain optimizations and add others, specifically for SSDs. Windows 7 incorporates many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes, which benefit SSDs in particular since each write operation wears the flash memory.

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Windows 7 also makes use of the TRIM command. If supported by the SSD not implemented on early devices , this optimizes when erase cycles are performed, reducing the need to erase blocks before each write and increasing write performance.

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Several tools and techniques that were implemented in the past to reduce the impact of the rotational latency of traditional HDDs, most notably disk defragmentation , SuperFetch , ReadyBoost , and application launch prefetching , involve reorganizing rewriting the data on the platters. Since SSDs have no moving platters, this reorganization has no advantages, and may instead shorten the life of the solid state memory. By default, a computer's disk is partitioned into two partitions: Windows 7 has also seen improvements to the Safely Remove Hardware menu, including the ability to eject just one camera card at the same time from a single hub and retain the ports for future use without reboot; and the labels of removable media are now also listed, rather than just the drive letter.

BitLocker brings encryption support to removable disks such as USB drives. Such devices can be protected by a passphrase, a recovery key, or be automatically unlocked on a computer. The more lengthy boot times on the remainder of the machines are mainly due to some services or programs that are loaded but are not required when the system is first started. Microsoft's Mike Fortin, a distinguished engineer on the Windows team, noted in August that Microsoft has set aside a team to work solely on the issue, and that team aims to "significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times".

They "focused very hard on increasing parallelism of driver initialization". Also, Microsoft aims to "dramatically reduce" the number of system services, along with their demands on processors, storage, and memory. Windows Media Center in Windows 7 has retained much of the design and feel of its predecessor, but with a variety of user interface shortcuts and browsing capabilities.

Some notable enhancements in Windows 7 Media Center include a new mini guide, a new scrub bar, the option to color code the guide by show type, and internet content that is more tightly integrated with regular TV via the guide. When browsing the media library, items that don't have album art are shown in a range of foreground and background color combinations instead of using white text on a blue background. When the left or right remote control buttons are held down to browse the library quickly, a two-letter prefix of the current album name is prominently shown as a visual aid.

The Picture Library includes new slideshow capabilities, and individual pictures can be rated. Also, while browsing a media library, a new column appears at the top named "Shared. A gadget for Windows Media Center is also included. Transcoding encoding support is not exposed through any built-in Windows application but codecs are included as Media Foundation Transforms MFTs. For playback of various media formats, Windows 7 also introduces an H.

Windows Media Player 12 uses the built-in Media Foundation codecs to play these formats by default. Action Center , formerly Windows Security Center, now encompasses both security and maintenance. A new user interface for User Account Control has been introduced, which provides the ability to select four different levels of notifications, one of these notification settings, Default , is new to Windows 7.

The feature will be disabled by default. When enabled the user will only have limited control as to which applications can track their location. Because only the Media Foundation application programming interface could interact with this environment, a media player application had to be designed to use Media Foundation. In Windows 7, this restriction is lifted. Windows 7 includes the new Windows Biometric Framework. In prior releases of Microsoft Windows, biometric hardware device manufacturers were required to provide a complete stack of software to support their device, including device drivers, software development kits, and support applications.

Microsoft noted in a white paper on the Windows Biometric Framework that the proliferation of these proprietary stacks resulted in compatibility issues, compromised the quality and reliability of the system, and made servicing and maintenance more difficult. By incorporating the core biometric functionality into the operating system, Microsoft aims to bring biometric device support on par with other classes of devices. A new Control Panel called Biometric Device Control Panel is included which provides an interface for deleting stored biometrics information, troubleshooting, and enabling or disabling the types of logins that are allowed using biometrics.

Biometrics configuration can also be configured using Group Policy settings.

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Alongside the workgroup system used by previous versions, Windows 7 adds a new ad hoc home networking system known as HomeGroup. The system uses a password to join computers into the group, and allows users' libraries, along with individual files and folders, to be shared between multiple computers.

Only computers running Windows 7 to Windows 10 version can create or join a HomeGroup. HomeGroup as a concept is very similar to a feature slated for Windows Vista, known as Castle , which would have made it possible to have an identification service for all members on the network, without a centralized server. HomeGroup is created in response to the need for a simple sharing model for inexperienced users who need to share files without wrestling with user accounts , Security descriptors and share permissions. Under this model, either a certain file or folder was shared with anyone who connects to the network even unauthorized parties who are in range of the wireless network or was not shared at all.

Windows 7 adds support for multiple firewall profiles. The Windows Firewall in Windows Vista dynamically changes which network traffic is allowed or blocked based on the location of the computer based on which network it is connected to. This approach falls short if the computer is connected to more than one network at the same time as for a computer with both an Ethernet and a wireless interface.

In this case, Vista applies the profile that is more secure to all network connections. This is often not desirable; Windows 7 resolves this by being able to apply a separate firewall profile to each network connection. Windows 7 contains Windows PowerShell 2. Windows 7 includes Internet Explorer 8 , [].

Paint features a Ribbon interface similar to the one introduced in Office , and also sports several new features. Calculator has been rewritten, with multiline capabilities including Programmer and Statistics modes, unit conversion, and date calculations.

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