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My favourite new features of Windows 7

I'm a happy user of Windows 7. I have been doing heavy multitasking with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 every day for the past 2 months without problems.
Written by Lee Lup Yuen, Contributor

I'm a happy user of Windows 7. I have been doing heavy multitasking with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 every day for the past 2 months without problems. Unlike my experience with Vista, Windows 7's sleep and resume functions actually work, so I hardly ever needed to shut down Windows 7.

Here are my favourite Windows 7 features that I used frequently over the last 2 months:

  • Pressing the Windows logo key together with the Left/Right Arrow keys will snap and maximise the current window to the left/right sides of the screen. I find this a terrific way to organize my windows quickly on my widescreen desktop, so that my e-mail window fills up the left half of the screen while my Web browser fills up the right half.

  • I used to install Snagit to capture screenshots, but now with Windows 7 I use the built-in Snipping Tool, which works almost as well as Snagit. The Snipping Tool lets me capture rectangular and free-form snippets of the screen.
  • Connecting Windows 7 to a projector is a lot simpler--I just press Windows+P to switch the projection on/off and to mirror or extend the desktop to the projector.
  • The Windows 7 Calculator has plenty of new useful features: Scientific, programmer and statistics functions, unit conversion (e.g. km to miles, celsius to fahrenheit) and date calculation (e.g. how many days old are you?).
  • Virtual XP Mode is very useful for running legacy applications that don't work with Windows Vista/7.

Windows 7 may not look very different from Vista, but Windows 7's improved stability and performance, together with useful enhancements like the above, makes Windows 7 a very worthwhile upgrade for business users.

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