Windows 7 Tips

Window Management

Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock;

Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes.

Globalization

There are several sets of themed wallpapers installed based on the language you choose, but the others are in a hidden directory. Simply browse to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and you’ll see a series of pictures under the Wallpaper directory for each country. Just double-click on the theme file in the Theme directory to display a rotation through all the pictures for that country.

Rearranging the Furniture

The icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place. You can reorder them to suit your needs, whether they’re pinned shortcuts or running applications. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 etc.

Quick Launch Toolbar

Right-click the taskbar, choose Toolbars / New Toolbar

In the folder selection dialog, enter the following string and hit OK: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

Turn off the “lock the taskbar” setting, and right-click on the divider. Make sure that “Show text” and “Show title” are disabled and the view is set to “small icons”.

Use the dividers to rearrange the toolbar ordering to choice, and then lock the taskbar again.

Peeking at the Desktop

Just press Win+Space

Specialized Windows Switching

 Another feature that power users will love is the ability to do a kind of “Alt+Tab” switching across windows that belong to just one application.

Focus to Taskbar

Press Win+T to move the focus to the taskbar. Once you’re there, you can use the arrow keys to select a particular window or group and then hit Enter to launch or activate it.

Explorer from “My Computer”

 To change the default starting directory for Windows Explorer so that it opens at the Computer node, navigate to Windows Explorer in the Start Menu (it’s in the Accessories folder). Then edit the properties and change the target to read:
 %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /root,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D} 

If you want the change to affect the icon on the taskbar, you’ll need to unpin and repin it to the taskbar so that the new shortcut takes affect. It’s worth noting that Win+E will continue to display the documents library as the default view.