System monitor gadgets can be very useful to have on your desktop. They provide the ability to monitor your computer’s resources at all times. It can alert you to usage spikes which can affect performance. These spikes are normally not a problem but they can sometimes be indicative of a problem caused by malware or a virus.

There are three recommended system monitor gadgets for Window 7. They are called CPU Meter, Network Meter, and Drive Meter. The CPU meter displays processor usage in real time on a graphical display. It also monitors RAM usage. The network monitor displays the IP addresses in use and tracks the volume of data which is uploaded and downloaded at any one time. And the drives monitor displays all the connected hard drives and their available capacities.

Another pair of useful gadgets are Facebook and Twitter Explorer. They allow you to frequently access and update news and events on these accounts. Basically it allows you to visit these sites and stay up to date on important events without actually having to launch a browser.

There are limitations to what these gadgets can do. For example you can’t add any friends with the Facebook Explorer But if you’re just looking to stay up to date and keep your friends and followers up to date, these may be perfect tools.

The Skype gadget is another useful tool which allows you to make and receives calls through Skype very easily and effectively. It is resident on your desktop and always available when needed. So stay in touch with those you want quickly and easily with this gadget.

Another great gadget is the Doppler Radloop. Yes there are many weather related gadgets for Windows 7 but this one provides real time information of radar loops. This can be especially useful and important for situations involving strong storms in the area or hurricanes, etc.

Yes many people got turned off the gadgets if they tried the sidebars within Vista. But Microsoft has done an outstanding job developing easy to use and effective gadgets with Windows 7. They are far improved over earlier sidebar applications.

So give these tools a try. You are sure to find a number which will be very useful to you.

Other phones make you click an application or go into a program in order to see the latest news, updates and/or other information. Here are a few more reasons as to what makes the new Windows 7 phones so great.

On the front screen or home page when you first turn your Windows 7 phone on, you will right then and there get all the information that you want. You can customize your front screen to display the current weather, bank account balances, Facebook updates, new emails and others.

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The phone has a touch screen, smooth swipe capability that will easily allow you to move from one hub to the next. You can fully customize your home screen to include anything and everything that you want on it.

Windows 7 phones are made for the individual and business person alike. It has so many customizable features that will work great for a business like seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook, Excel, PDF readers and others. It will also allow you to send and view files that most smartphones won’t.

These Windows 7 phones also allow users to stay in touch with others by integrating Facebook, Twitter and most of the other popular social media sites online. You are always just one click away from uploading pictures and videos to share with others directly from your phone and no matter where you are at.

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With the Windows 7 DVD Maker we can make professional looking DVDs from our home movie clips.

To get started go to Start > Programs > Windows DVD Maker.

Then click on add items. Browse your video library and select the clips you would like to work with. Once you add them to the DVD Maker you can change the order and add or remove items, you can also select your DVD burner.

Once you have your clips selected and in order give your DVD a title and click on next. Now you have the option of selecting Menu Styles and there are many cool built in styles to choose from. Then you can change your font and button styles and you can change your foreground and background video and preview your options. You can also add audio if you so desire.

Many people shy away from things like editing DVD files but using the Windows 7 DVD Maker makes it really simple. Take some time to browse the styles and options and experiment a little, use the preview button to check out your selections. Once you are happy with your work; click on Burn DVD and there you go, a professional style DVD in minutes.

Imagine the terror in my eyes when something in the process made my computer crash, hang, and refuse to boot. Fortunately, there is something called Windows 7 System Restore which uses System Protection which creates and saves points on our computers at regular intervals and also when we make system changes such as installing new software, patches, and updates.

So if you make a change to your system configuration and suddenly the system becomes unstable you can restore your computer to an earlier time. This is also helpful when combating issues created by virus problems. Let’s say that you get a virus from a file attached to an email. You’ve uninstalled the file and ran your virus scan software, but your system still isn’t functioning normally. This would be a good time to restore your computer to an earlier point.

The system changes will not affect your personal files, so it is a good idea to have a backup plan in place for your personal files, since System Restore is no help in recovering damaged or lost data. You can find System Restore under programs or go to your start menu and do a search for System Restore.

When you run system restore it will suggest going to your last restore point or you can click on next and choose a different restore point. There is also a scan for affected programs button, that you can use to see how different programs will be affected at that restore point. The scan will notify you of any programs that will be deleted or installed at that restore point and give you the opportunity to override these options.

Once you have made sure you have chose the correct restore point and software options click on run then you will get a warning saying once the restore is started it can’t be stopped. Go ahead and click on yes to continue. Your computer will log off and shut down to restart the restore. Once the restore is finished you should have a perfect running system again.

If for some reason the restore didn’t fix the problem or made it worse you can still undo that restore. Just go back to the System Restore program and click on Undo System Restore then click on next and choose the last undo under the system restore choices. This will run through the entire restore procedure again.

Having a built in System Restore feature can help keep your system running smoothly and give us peace of mind when making changes to our system.

Windows 7 has the most bells and whistles of any desktop operating system, yet in order to push the powerful business capabilities of Windows 7, games have been turned off by default. Take heart my fellow drones, the games can easily be turned back on. Couple this with a high-speed processor and broadband, and Windows 7 has put the fun back in productivity.

If your games folder on your start menu is empty, you will need to install the games that come with Windows 7.

This is easy to do just go to your Control Panel and click on Programs. Under programs, you will want to click on turn Windows features on or off.

Now you can select the features that you would like to turn on. These are installed with your OS; they are just not activated yet. To turn a feature on you will need to put a check mark into the box next to it.

You can select all of the games or just individual games. Now might also be a good time to browse any other features you may need in the future. I always say the best way to learn a new OS or software is to explore what is under the hood.

Once you have selected the games you want click on OK and wait while they install. Now when you click on the games folder from the start menu you should see all of the standard Windows 7 games.

Why is XP mode only available with the Ultimate and Professional versions of Windows 7? Because Windows 7 already has a built in compatibility feature which should enable most home users to automatically run their older applications. XP mode is designed specifically for legacy business applications, which usually have expensive licensing requirements and are replaced and upgraded at a much slower pace than with home applications.

XP mode does not run automatically on Windows 7 you first have to download and install it. The first thing you will need to do is go to the Windows Virtual PC download page http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx and select your Operating System and Language and then download Windows XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC, and the Windows XP Mode update. Once these files are downloaded and installed, you will be able to find XP Mode under the All Programs button from the Windows 7 Start button.

Once you have these files installed, you will need to configure Windows XP Mode. Step 1: go the Start Menu and select Windows XP Mode under Windows Virtual PC. Then accept the license agreement, create a password, and decide if you want to share files or not. It is also a good idea to select automatic updates.

Now Windows XP will appear as a window on our Windows 7 desktop, now all we have to do is install our legacy XP applications and we will be in business. In order to install applications in XP Mode open XP Mode in full screen.

Let us say we are using a USB device to install the application. At the top of the screen, there will be a bar, where we can choose the installation device and then browse to the device and the application. Once we have selected the application just install it as usual. When installing the software be sure to select install for all users so that the program will be accessible from Windows 7.

Now choose release device from the USB drop down menu and open Windows 7. You can now access your legacy program from within Windows 7 using the program menu or you can pin the program to your start menu or the task bar. Easy peasy!

Using Windows7 Snipping Tool

Another cool feature is the Snipping Tool this is a free built in screen capture and editor program. It doesn’t have all of the features of Techsmith’s Snagit, but it will allow you to create a window snip, a Full-screen snip, a rectangular snip, or even a free form snip you outline by hand. The editing options are simple and useful. You can highlight items, draw with a colored pen tool, and erase your work to start over. The snips can be copy, saved, or sent to your email program.

Windows7 And Paint

If you are comfortable using the Print Screen Key you can do that in Windows 7 as well. Just hold down the shift key and the PrtScn key and whatever is on your screen will be saved to your clipboard. To view and edit your saved print screen, open paint, and then click on paste. The version of Paint that comes with Windows 7 is also updated and easier to use. It has the new ribbon design that is used in Office 2010.

By the way if you haven’t downloaded the Beta Version of Office 2010, do yourself a favor and try it out. The Beta version will be good until October 2010. If you are a student, you can get great deals on software by purchasing academic versions.

Improved Calculator Too!

Even the calculator in Windows 7 is improved. The calculator in Vista gives you the option of Standard and Scientific. The calculator in Windows 7 gives you the options of; Standard, Scientific, Programmer, Statistics, Unit Conversion, Date Calculation, and even Mortgage, Car Lease, and Fuel calculations.

It seems like substantial effort was put into improving Windows 7. Do yourself a favor and take the time to explore your new Operating System, you just might discover something new and useful.

If you haven’t already installed Virtual PC 2007 you can get it here.

Now I would like to talk a little bit about installing and configuring in general. Often times when it comes to computers there are several ways to do different things. It is also true that depending on your specific system and configuration some methods will work better than others. The reason I’m touching on this subject is that I found methods that theoretically should of worked on my system, but for whatever reason they didn’t. When I searched the issues I found that others were having the same problems that I was, so these are the steps that actually worked for me.

The first thing I needed to do was download the ISO file of the Windows 7 Enterprise Installation Disk. An ISO file is an exact image of a disk, not a copy of the files on it. The first problem I encountered was that Microsoft uses a download manager the .iso file also has a .dlm extension on it.

Even though I could use Winrar to see the files on the disk and launch the disk for burning using Free Easy Burner I had trouble getting the image to burn on a DVD. You are supposed to be able to take an ISO file and burn the image onto a DVD which will create an installation disk.

The burning of the installation disk is actually an extra step with Virtual PC because you can install directly from an ISO file since it is an exact image of an installation disk. So I wanted to download the installation files without using the Download Manager so I wouldn’t have to deal with that extra .dlm extension.

The easiest work around I could find was to look at the source files (view source) on the download page and find the URL and copy and paste directly into a browser window. This enabled me to download the files without using the download manager and having to deal with the extra .dlm extension.

Now that I have the ISO file on my computer I need to open Virtual PC and select the virtual machine I previously created in the PC Console. A new window will open which will be the new Virtual PC without an operating system. Eventually you will see a message that looks like this (insert image 1).

Next click on the CD menu on the virtual machine window, then choose Capture ISO Image, and use the browse button to find your ISO image and click on OK. If the setup screen does not launch click on reset on the virtual machine and the Installation for Windows 7 Enterprise should begin.

Now all you have to do is follow the onscreen prompts and your new operating system will be installed, within the Virtual PC, on your existing machine. The nice thing about this is, if anything goes wrong, it will be contained within the Virtual PC and your current OS and files and settings will not be harmed.

At Install 7 this is just one method for installing Windows 7 that we will be talking about, below are screen shots of my new Virtual installation of Windows 7 Enterprise.

Today things are much easier thanks to Virtual PCs. A Virtual PC is a software tool that you can install on your current machine. The Virtual PC emulates a stand alone PC. So once we have a virtual machine installed on our current machine we can then install another operating system onto the virtual machine. The new operating system will run within the virtual machine independent of our current operating system.

This means that we can install and uninstall, test software to our hearts content, without having to partition or reformat our hard disks. After you have installed the virtual PC software it is a good idea to check the minimum requirements of the new OS that you will be installing, because as we create our Virtual PC we need to allocate hard drive space and memory. These resources come from our available hard drive space and memory, so you don’t want to degrade the performance of your main OS by allocating too many resources to the Virtual PC.

Windows 7 uses a Virtual Machine to run XP Mode so that Windows 7 users can still use older software programs. I will be talking about using XP Mode on Windows 7 in the next article.

If you are running Windows Vista or XP you can use Virtual PC 2007 to create a virtual machine environment to run and test multiple operating systems.

If you are running Vista Home Premium and you try to install Virtual PC 2007 you will get an error saying that the OS is not supported and to upgrade your OS to Ultimate or another Vista option. You can just bypass this option, because even though it isn’t supported it runs fine on Vista Home Premium.

Virtual PCs are great for creating test environments and studying for certification exams. Virtual machines are also being used in Enterprise environments to save on resources. In the past Enterprise environments would require several separate physical servers to function. For instance a business may require several domain controllers, an application server, an email server, and an Internet Server.

With a virtual environment more than one server can be set up on the same physical machine requiring less physical resources. Companies like VMWare specialize in Virtual Servers for enterprise environments. With Windows 7 having it’s own Virtual PC and enterprise computing embracing the virtual environment virtual computing is here to stay.

Pin Programs To Taskbar

Jump Lists – Let’s say we use Word a lot so we pin Word to the taskbar now if we hover the mouse over the Word icon in our taskbar and right click, we will get a jump list, which is a list of all of the recent Word documents we have been working with.

Aero Shake – If you have a lot of Windows open on your desktop you can grab the top of a window you want to view and shake it and all of the other windows will minimize, if you want to bring the other windows back, you can use the keyboard shortcut combination of the Windows Key + Home Key.

Windows 7 Performance Enhancements for Laptop Users

If you put your laptop to sleep and come back and hit the resume button it will reconnect to your wireless network in seconds.

Another nice enhancement for Windows 7 laptop users is location aware printing. If you routinely print to multiple printers from your laptop and you have Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. You can set up default printers for each network you use. Then you won’t have to manually switch printers when you move between locations. So when you print at work, Windows 7 will automatically print to your work printer. When you print at home, Windows 7 will automatically select and use your home printer.