Gadgetory

hey guys it's LP from TechnoBuffalo and welcome back for a very exciting advanced overview of Windows 7 in the first video we looked at the aesthetic improvements and some of the more prominent features of the OS in fact I got a couple of pretty good emails in a response for that video and one of the emails meant like this you spent two and a half minutes on wallpapers and themes are you gay well I'm not gay but you're in luck I won't be spending time looking at themes in these videos so in the upcoming Windows 7 videos we're going to be going deeper into the new features and improvements we no 7 in my opinion is all about efficiency faster access to different tasks and more efficient ways of completing those tasks and speaking of faster access let's start off with some more keyboard shortcuts shortcuts in my opinion are always good but don't take too many shortcuts in life because you might miss out on something anyway when you're in a folder you can press alt P to bring up a preview view of the files or in this case pictures what you're looking at pretty exciting stuff when you hold down Windows and the spacebar you enable the arrow peak function which gives you a view under the screens you have opened on the desktop last time I showed you the Aero Snap feature which attaches your Windows to the edges of the screen to speed things up you don't have to use your mouse to do this you can just easily press down the Windows key and hit the arrow keys in the direction of your choice pressing the Windows key and the up arrow will maximize the folder and pressing windows down will minimize also a very functional key command has been added for zooming in just hit the windows + + key to get it nice and close not a bad feature win for example reading small fonts and other stuff that's under the limit of your vision when you zoomed in the mouse will follow your actions pressing down the Windows key and the minus key will get you back out okay next up is the rehashed Windows Media Center I'm just going to take a brief look at Windows Media Center because there's so many features that would take an entire video to cover Windows Media Center on Vista was a bit clunky and a bit slow at times but the media center has been tweaked for Windows 7 it's faster it looks sleeker and best of all it seems to work I had some serious blue screen of death issues with my DVD tutor Windows Vista which was not cool at all the media center interface seems to be quite fast and definitely easy to use it's very simple to set up your music and video libraries but the single coolest thing about the new Media Center is that how easy it is to set up with an extender device such as my trusty Xbox 360 all you need to do is have your Xbox 360 hook up to the same Rooter and from your my xbox menu launch the media center and you will be prompted with an 8 digit code enter the code on your PC and press next and that's about it now you have your Xbox 360 attached to your PC and you can stream any media content to your home theater on your xbox you will be getting the exact same media center interface which is also very cool and you don't have to have media center running on your PC to do this just make sure the windows 7 is up and running and you can access media center on your Xbox at any time and after having streamed a couple of movies to my xbox 360 I can say that it seems to work great there's not much reason to fill up your Xbox hard drive with music and videos because streaming is now so painless I can definitely recommend using media center on the Xbox also let's take a quick look at the new Media Player 12 in Windows 7 as you can see there is now a streaming option on the toolbar itself and streaming is now possible over the local network but also over the Internet and the set of procedure is equally as simple as the setup process we looked at on the media center the setup requires you to associate with a Windows Live ID which then enables you to for example set up an online media library at home and access your files for example music and videos at work some pretty cool stuff but I still feel that the media player still lacks a bit in usability for example compared to iTunes whole group is also a new addition to Windows 7 it's basically a simplified way of setting up your home network I've personally never had issues with sharing my files between my home computers but if you found it too tricky in the past homegroup dumbs the process down to a few simple tasks just choose the files and/or devices you want to share and create the homegroup the setup wizard will give you a password and that's about it you've created the homegroup now the homegroup you have created will appear on devices connected to your network so you can just use the password you were given and connect to the homegroup as you probably noticed the homegroup is now listed as an icon in the my computer window sharing your files and your home network is now so easy that if you manage to fail setting up a homegroup I'll personally come down and give you a good slap in the face ok let's take a look at some of the new features in the control panel new to Windows 7 is the Action Center sounds pretty cool right well this time around I'm not talking about the Chuck Norris type of action but basically the type of action that you don't want to see the Action Center on the taskbar will pop up as a flag if there's a severe issue that needs your attention for example issues relating to lack of virus protection or having not backed up your system which it seems I've yet not done but in any case the Action Center is basically a one-stop place where you can find system maintenance information and where you can try to address and troubleshoot issues and problems that Windows has detected also a very cool new feature in the security setting is the BitLocker BitLocker is a very easy to use security software that makes it possible for you to encrypt any of your content for example external hard drives or USB drives so that they're only accessible using a password so if you're like me and you do some moonlighting for secret government agencies it's probably a good idea to encrypt your files just select the drive to be encrypted and enter a desired access code you and you may want to save the recovery key somewhere just in case you lose your password so don't have to recruit the friendly neighborhood hacker to recover your files the encryption takes a few minutes depending on the device or encrypting and there we go encryption complete so when I take out the USB drive and put it back in I'm prompted with a window asking for my password I think BitLocker is a very cool security feature to have just in case another smart addition to Windows 7 is the improved window search which is starting to remind me of a certain Mac OSX feature called finder searching index files is super fast and the control panel has been now added to the indexing which is very convenient for fast access to your device and hardware settings the next feature is something pretty cool and it's called XP mode and it's pretty much what it sounds like it's basically a virtual machine that runs Windows XP like any other application on top of Windows 7 it was very easy to set up and here it is running in a window but you can also run it in full screen if you want it has all the old applications and most of the functionality that Windows XP had but XP Mode is mainly meant for backwards compatibility for older programs and devices that just aren't compatible with Windows 7 and while we're here let's take a quick comparison of the word pads and check out how it's been redefined for Windows 7 so on the right we have the old word pad from windows XP and Windows Vista and on the left we have the new redefined Windows word pad with the new ribbon interface Microsoft is really trying to push the new ribbon interface something already seen in office 207 the ribbon interface is basically meant to replace all these old looking drop-down toolbars with an okay looking tab based approach I'm not sure if I liked how it was integrated into office 207 in my books functionality always comes first aesthetics comes second and I'm not sure if the ribbon interface improved functionality in office 207 but I have to admit it looks pretty smart here on WordPad and also on paint so it could be that it only takes a bit time to get used to but in any case XP mode is a great feature for backwards compatibility and it also kind of works like a time machine you can always turn the XP mode on and imagine that you're back in 2003 ah good times so we're about to wrap up this video but I should mention that there are a lot of smaller improvements and new features to Windows 7 for example the resource monitor has now been upgraded with a new graphical display of memory usage also new to Windows 7 is the possibility of installing virtual drives and a great addition to this Windows Explorer burning software is that it's now possible to burn ISO images onto disk using only the windows explorer burning software which is very cool indeed last but not least to the not so cool stuff here are the prices for Windows 7 home professional and ultimate well look on the bright side it is cheaper than Windows Vista when it came out but it's definitely going to tear a hole in your wallet the size of a decent 50 caliber gun blast and after just paying only 30 bucks for macro 6 10 upgrade paying 200 bucks for an upgrade to get Windows 7 which I've been already using on the beta for 8 months feels like a punch in the face so what do you think are the new features worth an upgrade to Windows 7 or are you going to be sticking with XP or Windows Vista post your thoughts in the comments and check out my next video where it put Windows Vista XP and seven through some demanding tests and benchmarks catch you later LP from TechnoBuffalo signing out