Posted by the editor on December 19th, 2009

Windows 7 has finally been released, and it is better than anyone expected. The speed is comparable to that of XP (it’s even faster once you used it for a week or two and Superfetch has learned what applications you use most often, so it preloads them) and there are a lot of improvements in usability and the interface.

I must say that I used Vista for a week before removing it from my laptop and installing XP back, primarily because it had a very annoying bug that made all video files render very slow and choppy or in the wrong format, and secondly because it was slow and my hard drives were always working on something, so when I tried opening a file or folder, it was very slow. I really liked the Aero interface, but that alone wasn’t enough to make me keep using it, especially with my old, trusty XP installation CD in my drawer.

So I am mainly comparing 7 with XP, not Vista.

I have been using Windows 7 for 3 weeks now, and here are the features that have really impacted the way I work (in a good way) and I don’t think I could do it as efficiently without them now:

Snipping Tool. This nifty little tool comes with Windows 7 by default in the Accessories folder. I didn’t know about it until a week ago and was using Snag-it (a very good snapshot taking and editing tool that served me well for 2 years). It is very small, light (no tray icon, nothing extra, just start it, select what you want to take a screenshot of and release the button) and I especially like the free-form mode where you can select anything in any shape (useful for when you want to make fast stylish screenshots or select only a certain menu).

Improved File Operations. A few very useful improvements were made in the area of file/folder operations. For example, when you move a folder with a lot of files inside from one drive to another and there are a few files that can’t be moved, you have the option to ignore those files and continue moving the others. Windows XP just stopped moving the files, so you were left with half on one drive and half on the other, not knowing what to do. Also, when you try to rename, move, delete a file or folder and it is used by another application, Windows 7 tells you exactly which app uses it, so you don’t have to guess or close every open application. It also gives you the possibility to continue the operation after you closed the app by clicking “Try Again”. Last, but not the least, an addition I found very useful is the ability to select multiple folders and open them at once by pressing Enter or clicking Open. You couldn’t do it in XP (only one folder opened).

Aero Snap. A nifty feature that also looks cool, Snap allows you to easily put 2 windows side by side by dragging them to the edge of the screen. Each one will fill half of the available space. This is very handy when you need to do file operations between 2 folders. When you close or drag the windows back, they will return to their previous size. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Windows Key + Left/Right Arrows” to pin the window in focus to the left or right side, respectively.

Libraries. I found the Libraries feature to be quite useful. It basically allows you to have all you files sorted by category or other criteria in different folders while not actually having to move them anywhere (so the files in the library are basically shortcuts to the real files and folders). I have a lot of stuff on 2 separate hard drives on my main computer plus a few GB of data on network drives, so I just created libraries for all those files instead of actually moving and organizing the real ones. I suspect this feature will make a lot of people lazier.

Frequently used files everywhere. Right-click on the libraries icon in the taskbar and you get a list of the most frequently open folders and files. Open the start menu and you can view the most frequent or recent files opened with any specific program (Word lists only .doc files, Notepad shows only .txt files, and so on). I found this very useful (mainly because I have a set of apps and files I use every day and I don’t really like to install new software).

These are 5 of the features I found useful and have grown on me since the first day. Now I can’t imagine what I’d do without them. There are a few other improvements, but they didn’t seem nearly as important to me as the ones above. So now you have 5 real, useful reasons why you should upgrade (also throw in the beauty and style of the Aero interface, it’s just lovely once you get used to it).