Windows 7: further impressions

I decided to dig a little further into Windows 7, and found some little goodies that would have been terrific to have at my last job.

The first is the Snipping tool. This tool will take a screen shot of your computer. Now, most of you know that pressing Print Screen on your keyboard does the same thing. What the Snipping Tool does is allow you to capture just a portion of the screen, rather than the whole thing.

This would have come in handy during my last job when I was trying to gather screen shots of the website I was part of to create a users manual. To get just small portions of the website, I had to capture everything and then crop out those things I didn’t need or want in the picture. This new tool would have saved me hours worth of cropping to get the almost 300 screen shots I needed for the manual.

The second item I discovered is called Sticky Notes. This gives you an electronic Post-It note that sits on your desktop until you delete it. This would have saved a lot of trees during my last job, as every night before I went home I created a series of post-its detailing what needed to be done the next day and stuck them to my screen so that I wouldn’t forget anything overnight.

If I had had this nifty little program, I could have just put them all on my desktop and had them there as soon as I booted up my computer the next morning, and just deleted them as I finished the task.

And for those of you who point out that Outlook has that already, let me just explain that we did not use Outlook (much to my sorrow) at my last job, we used Lotus Notes (and a really old version of it) that did not have that functionality.

As I had stated in my previous post, I am using a very old laptop to test Windows 7. So old, in fact, that my Windows Experience rating is a mere 1.0. This is due to the video card, and as long as I do not try to play any games on this computer, Windows 7 is running for the most part just fine.

I am also running a Pentium 4 and have only 1.25 gigs of RAM, so with that in mind, I am thinking that even the lowly $300-$400 net-books should be able to run Windows 7 just fine, provided they have enough RAM installed.

Would I recommend Windows 7? Oh Hell Yeah!!

This is quite possibly the best version of Windows I have ever used, and I have used them all at one point or another.

Now, if I could just keep it from locking up every time I try to read the SD card from my camera…