Every day I am continually amazed at how awesome windows seven is. It seems that I keep finding new features that completely win me over. For example right now I am writing this post with my voice. So here is a top 5 list all of my favorite Windows 7 features.
1. 
These are in no particular order, just in the order remember how awesome they are. Obviously the first being the built in speech recognition tool. I really didn’t discover this until recently when my wrist started huting again. When I first had my daughter I hurt my wrist somehow. I have a brace that I wear when it starts hurting again, and it really only starts up every so often. I had tweeted that today was going to be interesting because I couldn’t type well, and someone told me to look into a speech recognition tool. On a whim I thought I’d see what my computer already had. I must say it’s REALLY awesome. I just say “switch to photoshop” and it switches my application. So I can navigate my entire system with just my voice. Then I just start talking and it will type what I’m saying. If I speak slowly and eliminate background noise it works best.
2. 
One of the really great things about Windows 7 is the way you can easily navigate between windows. If I click on the program’s icon in the taskbar I am greeted with all of the windows currently open for that program and I can easily see and select which one I wanted to look at. For Internet Explorer it not only shows me the different pages I have open in different windows, but all of the pages I have open in different TABS in my Internet Explorer! I can very easily select which screen (or website) I need and voila, I’m there!
3. Another feature that helps make navigation easier is Jump Lists. I have to say, I don’t know how I survived before Jump Lists! All I do is right click the application in the task bar and it brings me up a list of documents that I have recently accessed for that program and whatever documents I have “pinned” to the menu. I pinned the two document in excel that I use on very regular basis so they are always super accessible. What is really great about this is that you don’t need to create different shortcuts and have things like that cluttering up your desktop. You can access all of the things you need the most and the quickest right from the task bar.
4. 
This has to be my favorite improvement in Windows 7. The notification bar has been VASTLY improved. Gone are the days of Windows XP when you click the little arrow and the notifications scroll almost all they way across your taskbar revealing all of the programs that are running the background. It’s given you the time, battery life, wifi and sound. Very simple and clean. Which being “the Organized Mom” I obviously adore simple and clean. The small rectangle to the right is a button called desktop peak which I actually end up using a lot. It takes the place of the desktop icon that used to be in the task bar. If you place your mouse over it the windows that are open fade out and you are able to view your desktop (if you only wanted to check the weather on your widget on the desktop). Or if you click on it, it will simply bring you to your desktop, minimizing all windows. There is also a quick “links” button that will take you to the favorite websites you have pinned to your favorites bar in Internet Explorer. Super easy, and again quick navigation to get you where you need to go.
5. I’m not sure if many people out there will have as much need for this little feature as I do, but the snipping tool is fantastic! A good built in screen capture tool has been missing from Windows for a while. Sure you could press “print screen” and paste it various places, but it worked sometimes at best, and never let you select exactly what you wanted to capture. Now you can capture errors you are getting, to send to someone to help you fix them, send a screen shot of your weather to make your friends in cold Utah jealous (not that my California friends would EVER cream of doing this to me… they love me more than that … RIGHT??)
This week will be all about Windows 7, and how much I adore it. If you have any specific questions about the new OS just tweet me!
*Disclosure – Microsoft did NOT pay me or compensate me in any way for this post. Microsoft probably doesn’t even know I exist. If you are WITH Microsoft and would like to pay me or compensate me in any way for this post… please feel free. 🙂
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Great post I have Windows 7 and still have not tried out the speech tool, this post just reminded me of it.
I have Vista on 2 laptops and my desktop. How much more memory does Windows 7 require? Will it slow down my current systems? Will I have to re-install every program on my computers? Is it compatible with all my programs?
Just curious as I too am interested in all the cool factors of Windows 7!
Thanks!
7 actually does a better job managing resources than Vista, so you should not need to upgrade your hardware. It will actually make your system faster. You would not have to reinstall if you UPGRADE from Vista. If you do a clean install you will. You would not be able to upgrade from XP to 7, you have to do a clean install at that point. If your programs are vista compatble, they should work fine on 7.
[…] The last thing I’m super excited about is my clean install. Over time I start collecting programs and things start affecting system performance. It’s nice to have a fresh clean start with all of the programs I actually need/want. Sometimes it’s just good to start with a new Operating System install… and you already know how much I Love Windows 7. […]