Gadgetory

hey guys it's LP from TechnoBuffalo and today we'll be taking a tour of windows 7 we'll be looking at the new features and basically looking at how they work this is the release candidate version of the beta bill 7100 and I'm running this overview on a mid-range setup I have an Intel quad clocked at three point four gigahertz and four gigs of semi-fast RAM I'm running Windows 7 off a raid zero so it may run a bit faster than off a single hard drive and as you can see even though I'm running the two caviar black hard drives and raid the Windows 7 performance testing gave me only a five point nine anything above five point nine is apparently reserved for solid-state drives okay let's get started an important factor in operating system in my opinion is how it looks it's essentially the piece of software that you're gonna be looking at most of the time while sitting at your computer so it's definitely something you don't mind to be pleasing to the eye Windows 7 comes with extensive customization features the wallpapers on themes can now be set as basically slide shows the pre-installed themes I think are quite nifty Microsoft has really found some nice-looking high-res wallpapers there are a bunch of pictures spanning from gorgeous landscape shots to some pretty freaky looking character drawings as well apparently mr. gates has some time to doodle now that he's retired and he's definitely beginning some stylistic influences from salvador dali the architecture theme has some stunning shots of very interesting looking buildings in the past I've usually just used my own custom wallpapers but these pre-installed wallpapers on Windows 7 are actually looking quite appealing just like on Windows Vista you can tweak the color settings of the taskbar and windows to suit your liking I think a bright pink might go pretty well with this blue color or maybe not when you get tired of pre-installed themes you can make your own slide show based theme just bring in your own set of pictures and set the time interval and you're pretty much good to go and you can shuffle up the pictures if you will anyone recognize what this wallpapers from now this is gonna be a good movie I must go see it whoops how'd that get in there now this is nice this wallpaper is from the upcoming Tron Legacy movie the desktop itself hasn't changed too much the sidebar from Vista is now gone but you can still have your average widgets or gadgets as they're now called that you can layout on your desktop double clicking on the gaps lays them out on the right edge of the screen you can also drag the guides to any place of the screen that suits your liking out of the way is usually a good idea a transparent grid automatically aligns the gadgets and icons and keeps the desktop looking clean I'm not going to be needing these but I will leave the CPU and RAM meter on so you can keep tabs of how much power the windows 7 is taking up just for clarification some of the RAM and processor usage has been taking up by the recording software which is recording this in high definition if you're interested in the software google camtasia 6.0 okay let's take a look at the more interesting changes to Windows 7 one of which is the new taskbar or the super bar as they now call it interesting prefix I would have called it the mega bar moving aside from the obvious aesthetic improvements there have been a couple of new features added to the taskbar when you run your cursor over the tab you get a preview of the program's open windows in this case we're looking at the open tabs in Internet Explorer and when you run your mouse over the small preview windows you can quickly preview the entire page without actually accessing it you can for example quickly check out what tabs you have left open on your internet explorer I'm done looking at these sites so it can actually close the tabs from here without going into the program itself to close them I think it's very cool that you can run your mouse over any open program icon and it will give you a small preview window also a cool new added feature is the Winnie right click on an icon you get some very convenient options when you for example right-click on the Internet Explorer icon you see your favorite or pinned websites on the top and here you can see there are most frequently visited pages which you can launch directly with good haste you can also pin some of your frequently visited pages to your pin section if you like okay also a very nifty new feature is that when you download any file on Internet Explorer you get a pretty cool progress bar on the task bar tab itself so when you are for example downloading big files you can easily keep tabs on your progression by simply looking at the task bar tab itself the right-clicking features work on any program as well here you can see some recent folders I've accessed and while we're here you probably notice the Windows 7 has some new sounds accessing folders gives out a kind of jazzy bass string chime which always brings at least to my mind the Fraser theme it could be just me though anyways as I mentioned the preview view works on any program right-clicking on the microsoft word brings out an option to launch recent port documents and it's an option that I very frequently use Windows 7 also has some Mouse free commands for operating the taskbar you can just hit the windows button and press the number that coincides with a program running from left to right on the taskbar for example I want to launch the Google Chrome program which is second from the left so I hit windows to the VLC player is fifth from the left so I hit Windows 5 this is also a feature I've grown accustomed to and I use quite often I mean come on moving your mouse is so 2007 ok let's actually bring the VLC player back up and I'll show you a cool new feature in Windows 7 you can grab almost any program and run it against the edges of your desktop it will stick to the edge and scale the window on the side of the screen so if you for example run it over here on the right and release it will scale the application to the right side of the screen or if left is your preference you can easily place it on the left if you drag the program to the upper edge it will maximize the window new feature saves time and scaling windows to appropriate size for example in multitasking situations and I actually use this feature quite a lot while writing my thesis during the couple of months of writing I actually watched four seasons of Battlestar Galactica on split screen you know heat is some inspiration for the writing multitasking at its best excellent show by the way I just ordered the whole series on blu-ray to replace my DVDs another feature coming up is called arrow shake for this we need to create a bit of a mess so let's open all these programs on top of the VLC player ever so often you might find yourself in a situation where you have a lot of windows and junk open on the desktop and you just need to get rid of all windows except one arrow or shake is a solution for this just grab a program from the top and shake it violently as you can see all other windows are minimized shake it again and it's a mess all over again and shake not a bad feature but sometimes you just want to clear the entire desktop and a button for this is found way down here on the right clicking it will clear the desktop it's great to see that this time around Microsoft have really listened to the core users they've kept all the features that worked and fixed or improved on some of the features and issues that didn't work on Windows Vista one of the reasons why has skipped on Windows Vista was the gaming on the operating system was worse than on Windows XP as you may have guessed I play a lot of games here are some of the games I've played recently but let's take a look at how Windows 7 can handle one of my favorites okay video settings art max and let's play some fallout 3 with Windows 7 on Vista I would be getting some lower frame rates and some stability issues as well even though Vista had DirectX 10 support which is the XP lacked not many games supported DirectX 10 at the time so I had no reason to stick with Vista but Windows 7 brings a change to this it's equally as fast as XP in gaming and it brings DirectX 10 support and support for the upcoming DirectX 11 as well hello kind sirs would you like to have 8 minutes have saw Oh that's gotta hurt this is the first of many windows 7 videos to come next month I'll be comparing Windows 7 against the Mac OS X 10 Snow Leopard which launches in September so stay tuned LP signing out that you feel