I came into my Home Office this morning to find my corporate laptop totally and utterly dead.
It was working on Friday, powered it up this morning and nothing. So this, given I’m planned on a lot this morning, was a real curve ball. However all wasn’t lost *too* much.
With the power of WHS, I had a full image of my data so could easily open my image from Friday and access the files I needed.
Email was again not too much of challenge as I have my Blackberry and WebMail.
What this did mean though was I’d need to use my newly built Windows 7 desktop for work this morning as opposed to my Vista desktop.
Overall, actually having to use it ‘properly’ for day to day work has been a pleasure. I also did discover some other fun bits whilst moving open windows around that I wasn’t fully aware of.
Windows Gestures
As Windows 7 is designed for Touch screens as well, there are a number of built in Gestures to assist users when using a touch screen interface. these also work with the Mouse (Click and then perform the gesture).
“Cut out the Clutter”
Ever had a whole heap of windows open and just wanted to clean everything up and only have the one window left showing that you're working on?
Click and ‘shake’ the title bar of the window you want left open. All others will be minimized. ‘Shake’ it again to restore your desktop to the previous (cluttered) state. Kinda cool and I think actually will become more useful that it first sounds.
I had accidentally done this a number of times and thought “What?! What did I do there, where have my windows gone?”. Now that I know it, I may well use it more often.
Jump Lists
Jump lists can also be initiated by a ‘drag’ of the Application icon on the taskbar(as opposed to a right click). Purely for touch user’s I’d say as right click is quicker (but a right click doesn’t fade in like it does with a ‘drag’).
There are a large amount of others as well, some I find I’ll use, some I won’t. Tim Sneath has a great post for Windows 7 that shows a lot of the secrets of the new UI. Check it out here.
I’m also trying out Tip 22 (The Widescreen Tip), by having my taskbar now vertical. Tim’s right, the whole design does now suit a vertical toolbar.