Rotate your desktop background photos
We have to admit that we were secretly excited to see what lovely new desktop backgrounds came with Windows 7, and we did see some snazzy ones. But imagine our elation when we realized we didn’t have to commit to just one background, but could put as many as we liked in a slide show that would constantly re-invent our desktop.
Right-click on an empty area of your desktop and select Personalize. (Or do it the old-fashioned way by going into Control Panel and selecting Change desktop background under Appearance and Personalization.) Click on Desktop Background on the bottom for a selection of available photos. (You will already be in this menu if you got there via the Control Panel.)
If the images Windows offers aren’t good enough for you, use Browse to navigate to your own photos you have saved on your PC. Hold Ctrl while you click to select as many backgrounds as you like. Once you’ve made your photo selections, click the check box next to Shuffle, then choose how often you would like your background to rotate (from every 10 seconds to every day). Click “Save changes,” and enjoy the show.
Use a hidden Windows 7 report to monitor your laptop’s power efficiency
One of the biggest complaints about Vista was that it tended to drain laptop batteries with greater abandon than XP. While we don’t expect Windows 7 to offer huge improvements in that department, Microsoft is putting more of that control in the users’ hands.
In Windows 7, you can observe your PC’s power efficiency and tweak settings to get the most out of your battery and the best balance between performance and endurance. Doing so is a little techie, but it’s not hard.
In the Start menu, type in cmd. Then, when the cmd.exe icon appears, right-click it, and choose “Run as an administrator.” At the command line that pops up, type powercfg –energy and hit Enter. At this point, Windows 7 will scan your system (it will take a minute or two) and publish a report in the folder indicated by the command line. Follow the path indicated to the file—it’ll be an HTML document—and look through the suggestions. Here's what we saw:
In our report, for instance, we got a handful of pink error messages stating that our power settings weren’t set for optimal battery life. Those are pretty easy to fix: Go toControl Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, then select which plan you’d like and click Edit Plan Settings. From there, you can tweak to your heart’s content. We also got a handful of yellow warning messages, such as “Power Policy: Disk timeout is long (On Battery).” Our hard drive was set to turn off after 1,000 minutes, but this warning suggests keeping that time to less than 30 minutes so that if the hard drive doesn’t need to be spinning, it can turn off after a given amount of time. The trade-off (and yes, there’s always a trade-off) is that when you choose a task that requires it to spin back up again, it can be slow in doing so.
This is a good report to run, so that, at the very least, you can get an idea of which settings affect power consumption. Once you have that knowledge, tweaking those settings is pretty simple.
Show the Windows Desktop with a new shortcut
If you’re anything like us, once you’ve installed a new operating system or bought a new PC, you start out organizing files and documents with the best of intentions. But before long your Windows Desktop becomes your de facto filing cabinet, peppered with shortcuts, frequently used spreadsheets, random photos, and abandoned detritus. The easy way to access that debris field to find something—theWindows key + D combination, which minimizes all Windows for a clear view of the desktop—is a helper that most of us know.
Windows 7, though, lets you bring up the desktop without taking your hand off your mouse or pointing device—but it’s not obvious how until you stumble upon it. In the extreme lower right portion of the screen, at the far-right edge of the taskbar, you’ll see a little vertical rectangle with a “glossy” finish. Hover the mouse pointer over it, and the Windows Desktop appears, letting you inspect it. (You’ll still see ghostly outlines of the windows you have open.) Move the mouse off the rectangle, and your windows reappear. You can also activate this via a keyboard shortcut: Windows key + spacebar.
Click on the rectangle, though (as opposed to hovering), and you’ll minimize all windows, allowing you to interact with the desktop, open folders, and the like. If you don’t open or maximize any new windows manually, clicking the rectangle a second time restores the view to the state it was in before you clicked.