Do serious math with Windows 7’s advanced calculator

It may sound humdrum, but Windows 7 has really upped its game when it comes to its calculator functionality. Now, instead of just standard and scientific functions, you can also do programming and statistical functions, as well as make short work of real-life tasks such as juggling mortgage numbers, computing hourly wages, and figuring out gas mileage.

The Calculator resides in the Start menu. (If it got shunted off the first level of your Start menu by other items, check under Accessories.) Use the View menu to switch among Standard, Scientific, Statistics, and Programmer modes. (Only the first two were available in Windows XP and Vista.) Plus, investigate the options further down the menu to address everyday calculation scenarios, such as adding and subtracting time in terms of dates. You can figure out, for example, how many days there are between now and Christmas—not typical calculator fare:

The final option in the menu, Worksheets, unfolds to show some additional calculation templates (figuring out payments on a vehicle lease, for example).

We also love that the new calculator includes a converter for units of measurement. These tweaks won’t change your life (and some of them Google can do for you), but now that you know they’re there, you’ll get some use out of them.

Shft-click (or middle-click) to open another instance of a program

At times, you want to open a completely separate, second version of a program, as opposed to an additional document window or tab within a single instance of a program. You may do it for ease of window organization, or for one of a host of other reasons. You can, of course, simply hunt up the program in the Start menu and launch it a second time, but there’s a much easier way, new in Windows 7.

Simply hold down the Shift key and click on the app’s icon in the taskbar—a second instance of the program will pop up. Or, if your mouse has a middle button (that is, a clickable scroll wheel), pressing that accomplishes the same task. Anything that replaces a meandering jaunt through the branching Start menu with a simple click is a very good thing, in our book.

Note that in some apps, and depending on how you have your taskbar set up (especially if you tweak it with the help of some of our tips), telling the difference between a second copy of an app that’s open and merely a second open window within a single copy of an app can be tricky. If your taskbar is set up to group like windows together, you may not see a second, discrete icon for a second, open version of the program, even though it is open. So rest assured: If you Shift-click and only get another grouped window under the original icon, you didn’t do anything wrong.

Burn ISO disc images directly from Windows 7

They’re a bit toward the geekier side of Windows: ISO files. You may have heard of them but not known exactly what they were. Simply put, an ISO file is an image of all the data on an optical disc, encapsulated in a single file. ISO files are commonly used for burning a perfect copy of any bootable disc, such as a recovery or boot disc.

You may have been given, or have downloaded, ISO files in earlier versions of Windows. (If you ran a beta version of Windows 7, you likely got it via an ISO-file download.) And if you did, you know that Windows didn’t provide any native provision for burning these files to CD or DVD to make them usable. Windows users have had to resort to freeware or commercial programs to burn ISOs in the past, but users of other operating systems have been able to do so without additional software for years.

Windows 7 changes all that—and makes it super-easy, too. To burn an ISO image in 7, all you need to do is double-click on the file, choose your optical drive (preload it with an appropriate blank disc), and click Burn:

That beats having to fumble with freeware or shareware apps in Vista or XP, any day.