Easy external-monitor or projector setup for laptops

If you’re a businessperson who gives lots of presentations from your laptop, this one is for you. We bet that you have probably encountered more than your fair share of frustration with configuring external displays or projectors to work with your laptop in unfamiliar environments. Between negotiating HDMI, DVI, and VGA outputs (each with its own quirks), and figuring out a resolution amenable to both pieces of hardware, you likely wish there was an easier way.

Here’s a bit of help. If you’re running Windows 7 on a laptop, memorize this shortcut: Windows key + P.

Tap it with a monitor or projector attached to the laptop’s video output, and you’ll get a new selector box that helps you configure the external display device:

You’ll see four options, from left to right. Computer only lets you revert your video settings to using just the laptop’s LCD. Duplicate, predictably, lets you display the same image on your laptop’s screen and the external display. (That’s the one you’ll most likely use for presentations.) Extend lets you stretch your Windows Desktop across the laptop display and the external display (much like in a multiple-monitor desktop-PC arrangement). And Projector only shifts the video output strictly to the external display device, blanking the laptop screen.

You can still make these adjustments the old-fashioned way, through the Control Panel (check out the Display subcategory there), but this method makes at least the initial setup snap-simple.

Restore the main menu bar in Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live Mail

This malady is not new with Windows 7 (it first reared its head in places in Windows Vista), but in a few major Windows apps, the familiar old top menu bar has disappeared. (That is, the one containing the File, View, and such crucial menus.) This was especially noticeable in Internet Explorer 7; now we’re seeing it in Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Live Mail.

It’s no big deal if you’ve dealt with it before—you hit the Alt key, and the menu bar pops up temporarily—but we still find it disconcerting and prefer to revert to the old, always-visible menu bar in these programs when we can. And if you’re a new recruit to Windows 7 straight from XP, the missing menu bar might be outright unnerving.

To keep the menu bar always visible in Internet Explorer 8, first hit the Alt key to bring up the bar (comprising File, Edit, View, Favorites, and so on). Then, right-click on the menu bar itself. On the context menu that pops up, you’ll see that the Menu Bar entry (the topmost in the list) is not checked off. Left-click on Menu Bar to check it, and that should lock the old-school bar back in its familiar place:

In Windows Live Mail, the process is a little different. On the right side of the topmost icon bar, you’ll see an abstract “menu” icon. (It’s between the paint-brush and question-mark icons.) Left-click it once, and select the Show menu bar option with a left-click:

Your File menu and its menu friends will be back where they belong. (You can deactivate them in the same place.)

Drag around maximized windows without resizing them first

In Windows 7, Microsoft finally fixed a recent pet peeve of some Windows users: the need to first resize a maximized window before it could be dragged around. This was a speed bump encountered often by users of multiple monitors, who are often in the habit of dragging windows from one display to another.

In older versions of Windows, if a window was maximized, you needed to hit the resize button in the upper right corner of the window (the box between the minimize and close buttons) to “downsize” it before dragging. In Windows 7, it’s possible to simply grab the title bar of a maximized window, and drag it around right away, no fuss. Just grab the circled area and go:

It’s a subtle thing, but a welcome revision and one that you might not notice is possible for some time, because habit would keep most of us from even bothering to try. The ability to drag windows around more freely also relates to our next tip: Aero Snap, which also provides new window behaviors (auto-resizing, in its case) when dragging a window around.