When asked about Win7, I find myself often speaking in the simplest terms to describe the product. I usually say "It has the eye-candy of Vista and the stability of XP". But really, it seems even more stable than XP ever was, except for Internet Explorer 8; that's just a dog. But I believe I have mentioned that here before.

Sometimes an even better part of something new is discovering some new trick that you can perform with it that you didn't know it would do when you bought it. Older Office users will know this as 'Easter Eggs', neat stuff embedded in the application that can only be accessed by special keystrokes or methods. That was Office: this is Win7. A little different concept, but cool none the less.

I have found two cool things that you can do in Win7 to gain extra functionality that MS did not advertise. I am hoping to find more, and if I do you will see it here, so stay tuned.

See attached files for God Mode and Restoring the Quick Launch Tool Bar from XP. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I have fixed the problem by adding the docs to a zip file.

Win7Goodies.zip (448.95 kb)

UPDATE 1/12/2010: Apparently, this is a developer tool that has been around for years. To see all their tricks, go here

I have been using Win7 now for a few weeks and I have really put it through it's paces. I have decided I like it so much that I have upgraded every workstation or laptop in my possession worth using to Win7. I also have a few little tweaks that will add some familiarity of XP and Vista to your Win7 installation...look for them here soon. (hint: Quick launch bar and disabled services)

If I had to give a simple answer on how Win7 stacks up, I would have to say the it has the eye candy of Vista and the performance and stability of XP. So far, and as I have mentioned before, the only Reservation I have is IE8...it's total crap. I work with Sharepoint A LOT, so the single sign-on afforded by IE is pretty much a must, but if it were not for that it would be Firefox or Chrome, without a doubt. IF you can deal with a non-native browser (and most people prefer to), then consider moving to Win7. It is much lighter weight than Vista, and before long XP will no longer be supported. You can actually use older machines to run Win7, ones that Vista ran like a dog on, provided they at least meet the Win7 minimum requirements.

All told Win7 is a hit. Microsoft needed to hit one out of the park after the Vista debacle, and this one is outta here. Users can finally be productive again, IT staff can quit fretting about an out of date OS and how they will keep it safe. CIOs can finally get on with the budget and focus on enterprise apps rather than on what they should do about desktop deployment (sit and stay or jump and gamble).

Yes, the verdict is in: Windows 7 is your next operating system. Get up on it.

Okay, so I updated my main workstation yesterday from x64 Vista to x64 Win7. Only one issue found so far. The connection entries in my terminal services applet got deleted. No worries, I rebuilt the 48 or so server connections for here at work and I am on my way. This OS is just too cool. It took almost 3 hours to do the upgrade as opposed to the 40 minutes or so for a clean install, but to be fair it does have a lot to do in an upgrade. And this is no lightweight PC. It is a dual quad core 2Ghz, with 8Gb of RAM and a RAID disk system.

I only have one other complaint and that is IE8 - absolutely lame. It looks like MS could make a browser. The only reason I have to use it is Sharepoint and SSRS. Other than that it looks like I will be getting Firefox very soon.

At a location where there are two print servers, Win 7 was asked to add a printer. XP compatible drivers were loaded on the W2K3 server, but no go. The printer in question was a Toshiba multifunction machine, so drivers are flaky at best.

After going to the support site and downloading Server 03/Vista drivers, everything worked as it should. All that I had heard about XP drivers working out of the box is now just a myth. But it seems that drivers that are/were Vista-ready work just fine.

Keep this in mind during your Win7 rollouts. The thought about printer drivers hit me as I was in the middle of placing this machine on the user's desk...what about printers? Be aware during your testing and make sure that you test any odd printers/faxes/scanner/weird peripherals that you may have, and update the drivers on the spot. So far this is the only thing I have seen that would delay a Win 7 rollout.

I received my copy of Windows 7 today and have it installed on an old HP Pavilion ZE4900 laptop. Install was painless, found all devices but sound and modem. Display is less than what is needed so Aero does not work but the machine is very fast. I had Ubuntu desktop loaded and it is as fast as that was. I have an overall score of One, so the hardware definitely leaves a lot to be desired. But XP barely ran on this thing anymore and Vista was out of the question. Chose Win7 Business x32.

I have a newer laptop running Vista x64 that I will upgrade soon. Until I have time to get to it I will keep testing this old thing. So far so good, much faster.

I will keep you posted on the progress.

Since I am blogging more now, I thought I would talk about the benefits of actually reading blogs. If you are like I am and have limited time to read news, especially news from blog feeds, an RSS feed reader can be invaluable.

RSS readers go out to all the various sites that you read blogs on and aggregate them all together into one nice neat place for you. There are free RSS readers all over the place. I will only be reporting on a few of these, but most of them work similarly, so if you apply these principles to any free reader, they will probably still work out for you.

First off, let's start with the obvious. A tool that most everyone has in their arsenal: Internet Explorer browser (Firefox works this way too, but they have nice plugins available as well)

Internet Explorer 7 (aka IE) and above are equipped with an RSS reader, courtesy of Microsoft. Let's take a look.

  Click the star and choose FEEDS 

Here you can look at Microsoft feeds, or add your own. To easily add more feeds, when you go to a blog site that is RSS syndicated (see the orange logo next to Feeds to make identifying them easy), click their RSS icon and click "Subscribe to this feed".

  Click and you are done  

The main problem I find with using IE is that you have to open IE and then open the Feeds, then make them update for you. Not too automatic, huh?

Another common tool we can use that is a little more automatic is Outlook 2007. RSS readers were not included in the older versions of Outlook, so if you are a little behind in technology, you are out of luck here. Outlook has some good help info within itself, so I will not go into how to do it here for the sake of brevity, but I will say that feeds update regularly, like email coming in, so once you read a feed, the folder link is no longer bold and as such, you know there are no new posts for that feed.

  See that some folders are bold and some are not.

If you don't have Outlook 2007, no worries. Just Google for a free RSS reader (I have no preferences here) and follow their instructions for installation.

Mobile devices are all the rage. Smart phones, iPhones, iPods, you name it. If you are an ultra-mobile type of person, look into getting an RSS reader for your device. I have one on my iPod touch, and anytime I am in a WiFi spot I can read my feeds and keep up with the latest news. I am looking into getting one installed on my WinMo phone, but it has not happened yet.

If you like staying current on news and are short on time, RSS readers can return lots of time wasted on surfing back to your day. Enjoy.