1. Boot performance is better Another common complaint about Vista has been the inordinate amount of time it can take to boot up. This might not be an issue for those who leave their systems on all the time, but if you turn off your computer every night, waiting around forever for it to get started in the morning can turn into a major annoyance. A Microsoft spokesperson indicated that the company’s goal for Windows 7 is a 15-second boot time, whereas three quarters of Vista users report boot times of more than 30 seconds. Although the beta of Win7 may not have achieved that 15-second mark yet for most users, the majority of beta testers I’m hearing from say it’s substantially quicker than Vista on the same hardware. That’s been my personal experience, as well. Since it is still a beta, it’s not unrealistic to hope that continued tweaking will get that time down further before the final release.

2. Explorer is no longer in pane in the behind: In a misguided attempt to alleviate the need for horizontal scrolling, Vista made the left navigation pane in Windows Explorer a constantly moving target. As you move your mouse, it will automatically scroll back and forth.
You can avoid the auto-scrolling by dragging the pane to make it wide enough to accommodate the entire tree, but that isn’t a good option on a small screen, such as the one on compact VAIO notebook. In Windows 7, the navigation pane stays still, so you no longer risk getting seasick from all the swaying back and forth.

3. Notifications can be fine-tuned In XP and Vista, you can disable the balloon notifications in the system tray, but what if you’d like to continue to get notifications from some applications but not from others? Windows 7 allows you to customize the behavior by simply clicking the little arrow next to the tray and selecting Customize. In the dialog box, choose which icons you want to appear in the tray. For each application, you can select whether you want to display notifications or hide them, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1

4. Side-by-side windows auto-size most of the monitors sold today come in a wide aspect ratio that’s better for watching movies, which is also handy for displaying two documents side by side on the screen. and they will automatically size themselves to each take up half the screen when you let go of the cursor. it goes back to the size it was before. How cool is that?
Figure 3

5. Home networking gets simple For home users without a lot technical know-how, networking has been made simpler in Windows 7. A new feature called HomeGroup allows all Windows 7 computers on a network to share files, printers, and other resources more easily. Thanks to Libraries (collections of certain types of files, such as music, photos, or documents), you can access files anywhere on the HomeGroup network as if they were stored locally, and you can search across the whole HomeGroup. Windows Media Player in Windows 7 can stream the music and videos on one PC in the network to another, and even play back songs.

6. Taskbar preview really works In Vista, you can hover over a taskbar button — for Internet Explorer, for example — and see that three instances of IE are open. You see the open pages stacked, but they’re so small that it’s difficult to really tell which page is which. In Windows 7, the preview feature has been enhanced so that it becomes an extremely useful function. Now when you over over a taskbar icon, you get actual previews that are placed side by side and are large enough for you to identify
And that’s not all. If you’re playing a video in one of the windows, that video plays in the preview window, too. And if you right-click the IE icon in the taskbar, you get a list of your IE history files, as shown in the figure
Figure 6
you can just click on any page and go on that link.

7. Windows 7 comes with IE 8, which provides such security enhancements to the Web browser as:
a) The SmartScreen filter– Replaces/expands upon the Phishing Filter in IE 7.
b) The XSS Filter — Protects against cross-scripting attacks
c) Domain highlighting — Puts emphasis on the relevant part of the URL so you can more easily determine the real location of the site you’re on
d) Better security for ActiveX and the ability to install controls on a per-site basis
e) Data Execution Prevention (DEP) enabled by default

8. AppLocker

Software Restriction Policies are included in XP and Vista and they seemed like a great idea. Administrators can use Group Policy to keep users from running particular programs that might present a security threat. But they’ve never been used that much because they aren’t easy to use.

Windows 7 has improved on the concept with a new feature called AppLocker. AppLocker is also included in Windows Server 2008 R2. It’s easier to use and gives administrators more flexibility and control. You can use AppLocker with domain Group Policies or on the local machine with the Local Security Policy snap-in. As you can see in Figure 8, AppLocker falls under the Application Control Policies node in the left pane of the snap-in.

Figure 8
Figure 8: AppLocker does the same thing as Software Restriction Policies, but does it better.

Win7 still supports the old Software Restriction Policies, too. Also note that AppLocker may not be available in some editions of Windows 7.

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