Instant, Windows-wide screen zoom within Windows 7
If you spend much time browsing the Web at a high screen resolution (we’d classify that as anything above 1,280x1,024) on a relatively small screen, you’re intimately familiar with browser-window zoom shortcut keys. (In Internet Explorer, for example, that’s the Ctrl key combined with the plus or minus key.) This shortcut quickly boosts the size of onscreen text. But wouldn’t it be handy to have that functionality available Windows-wide?
Windows Vista did have a system-wide magnifying tool, and that tool also appears in Windows 7. (The easiest way to access it: Go to the Start menu and type Magnifierinto the search box.) But 7 is the first Windows version to natively include a browser-style magnification shortcut key at the operating-system level. In 7, try it: Hit theWindows key, combined with the plus or minus key.
This is an overarching zoom control that you can use in most normal programs or windows. (It doesn’t, for example, work in Windows Media Center, as you might guess.) By default, though, the zoom stepping is pretty large, with the zoom going from normal-size screen to elephantine with one key press. To adjust the zoom scale, go to theMagnifier tool (as described above), and click on the little, faint gear icon to see theMagnifier Options dialog. (It took us a while to find that one.) In the slider bar that you see at top, reduce the zoom level as appropriate:
We pushed ours all the way down to 25 percent, so each press of the key combination zoomed in baby-elephant steps.
Don’t lose your work because of automatic updates
Microsoft certainly loves its Windows updates, and it’s aggressive about keeping your OS current with them, whether you want to be or not. The default time that automatic updates happen is typically in the middle of the night, and in our experience, we found that these late-night updates, which require a restart, could cause us to lose unsaved work. Granted, we should know better than to walk away from our PC overnight with unsaved files open, but even so, be on guard. This is an easy fix, but one you might not think about until it’s too late.
You can change this setting by going to Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Update (or just do a desktop search for “automatic updates”). Click onChange settings, and then, under Important updates, select anything other thanInstall updates automatically (recommended):
We chose Download updates but let me choose whether to install them. That setting allows you to install them (and subsequently reboot your system) only when the time is right for you.
Discover advanced Windows 7 touch functions
Chances are, if you’ve seen an iPhone commercial (and definitely, if you own one of the devices), you get the gist of touch-screen tech. Multi-touch capability, which involves using more than one finger to execute a touch task, is integrated much more seamlessly into Windows 7 than into earlier versions of Windows. So if you jump into Windows 7 by buying a new PC, and happen to get one of the increasingly common laptops or all-in-one desktops with touch-screen capability, here are a few touch tricks your documentation may not tell you about.
In addition to the familiar rotating, zooming, and swiping functions, we suggest learning three more: the two-finger tap, press-and-hold, and the flick.
Two-finger tap: Tapping on the screen with two fingers simultaneously zooms in by the system’s default zoom increment. The area that zooms depends on where you tap; the feature will try to focus in on the center of the gesture. Not all apps will do this, but we’ve found it particularly helpful for making precise clicks on links on a Web page.
Press-and-hold: If you press and hold with one finger, you can launch a right-click context menu on an icon or the desktop. The same is true if you press one finger and then tap with a second.
The flick: Just like some mice have forward and back buttons for browsing the Web, you can use a flick gesture to do the same. Do a quick, light up or down swipe of your finger to scroll up or down a page, or swipe left or right to navigate forward or back through a browser. It sure beats all those buttons.
