The cool new features in Windows 7 that were not there in beta

Microsoft’s Windows 7 is releasing soon and most of you must have already got chance to play with its beta version.

Microsoft has received hundreds and thousands of feedback from the users for the Windows 7 and team are working hard from past two months. This is being explained by the Vice President for Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, Mr. Steven Sinofsky.

The team is also working for the other new features for Windows 7 that will appear in the Release candidate or the RC. The Senior Program Manager of the Core User Experience team, Chaitanya Sareena, has talked about the following new cool features added to the Windows 7.

Aero Peek will work when you are Alt + Tabbing

Aero Peek let you to preview the windows by actively changing and bringing the pages at the top of the pile. Now this is being added to the Alt + Tab so that you can preview the full content of every window when passing through them. This is activated by a time delay if you pause while passing through windows.

The Windows Logo key becomes useful

Sareena also mentioned that the computer geeks have always asking for more keyboard shortcuts in order to simplify their most common work. Efficiency is key,” explains Sareena. He further told that in Vista the Quick Launch apps use to start by pressing the Windows logo + # shortcut. But now in Windows 7 it can even switch so that you can directly move to the applications.

Changes to needy windows

When Windows flash at you from the taskbar, it is a “needy windows” as it is called by Microsoft. Now in final Windows 7, they will look more prominent. They have also received the feedback that the Messenger chat or Outlook reminders sometimes become unnoticeable as the needy windows are too delicate. Therefore, the team has made few changes here. Here they have changed the flashing animation curve in order to make it more prominent. Also, they have now used a bolder orange colour. They also wanted to increase the number of flashes, now it is set to three.  As a signal of Windows 7, they have decided to put 7 flashes instead of 3.

Fitting in more taskbar icons

The taskbar of Windows 7 is all about saving more spaces. However, many are asking for even more spaces to hold the programs they are regularly using. Sareena stated that, “We’ve made a change to squeeze in 24-39 per cent more icons before the taskbar scrolls; depending upon your resolution, icon size and assuming the default notification area.” Now at 800×600, we can have ten large icons and fifteen small ones. There is an increase of up to 36 per cent. This increase is almost 39 per cent at 1,600 x 1,200 along with the ability to have 26 icons.

Newly installed programs are more understandable

In the new feature, when a program is installed, it is temporarily and automatically appears below the Start Menu.”

Lock machine without a screensaver

Till this time the corporate machines were automatically lock up after sometime if not in use.  Well, up till now it needed a screensaver to set it up. Now in Windows 7, machines can also be locked without having screensaver.

Faster access to High Performance power plan

This is just great for a gamer or a person who is a regular laptop traveler. It was little bit irritating to toggle between the High Performance and the Balanced power plans because the High Performance has not been on the fly out menu on the system tray. Now it is possible.

Filtering contents that cannot be played

The design of Windows Media Player has been made in such a way that will show the list of all contents that you have on your PC, irrespective of the stuff that it could play or not. Now, it will show only the stuffs that the media player could play.

Resume from sleep when it watches downloads

Till now you were used to resume your CD or DVD, but with new Windows 7 you can even able to resume your video files also. However, in the beta version it was not there. Customers are now wanted to experience in the same way as they do with their physical media.

Better camcorder support

Now Windows Media Player will naturally support the .mov files as used by many other digital cameras in order to capture the videos.

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Tags: Beta version, Core user, microsoft, Needy Windows, windows 7