“Aero” is the name of the glitter and glitz and gives Windows 7 a lot of the eye candy you see in the Scott Cate Windows 7 video tutorials. Some users do not have Areo installed on their Windows 7. It’s possible that their video card (or other hardware) isn’t strong enough, or maybe they’re running a virtual instance of Windows 7. Whatever the reason, if you don’t have Aero enabled, you don’t have Aero Peek. This is the feature that gives you a popup preview of the applications that are running, as you hover over the launch icons in the task bar.

The following Key Board shortcuts will help you navigate your open (and to be opened) applications faster.

• [WINDOWS LOGO]+[NUMBER] – Open the item in that position (if the application is already open, this action will toggle minimize/restore.
• [WINDOWS LOGO]+[NUMBER] – Open an additional instance of the numbered application. In the video, another instance of Internet Explorer.
• [WINDOWS LOGO]+[CTRL]+[NUMBER] – Cycle through the like applications that are open. In the video we have several instances of Internet Explorer running, along with many other applications. Where regular [ALT]+[TAB] or [WINDOWS LOGO]+[TAB] will cycle through all open applications, [WINDOWS LOGO]+[CTRL]+[NUMBER] will just cycle though our running instances of Internet Explorer.
• [WINDOWS LOGO]+[ALT]+[NUMBER] – Open the context menu of the numbered item. With Internet Explorer, this shows your most recently used pages/tabs, as well as any pinned items that you may have.

And if a picture is worth a 1000 words, you should be happy I did the video, which saves me a lot of typing to show and explain all these keyboard shortcuts in action. Enjoy the video tutorial.

If you ever have an audience that is looking at your screen, you have a couple of options to change your screen resolution. You can go all out, and actually change your resolution, but that sometimes has a drastic effect that manipulates all your applications, toolbars, etc. Remember that there is a difference in what you should do, based on your audience. If there are 3 or 4 of you hovered around your monitor for a few minutes, then changing your resolution is probably not a nice choice. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of people in your Microsoft TechEd audience, then you absolutely change your resolution to 1024X768.

In both situations, if you are projecting your screen, it’s helpful to know about the Windows 7 Magnifier.

The video will show how all this works, but for keyboard junkies, here are the keyboard shortcuts …

• [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][+] – Activate the Magnifier, centering the magnification on your current cursor position, magnified at the last zoom percentage.
  • If the magnifier is already active
  • [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][+] will increase the magnification percentage by 100
• [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][-] – Lower the Magnification percentage in increments of 100 [500%,400%,300%,200%,100%]
• [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][ESC] – Close the Magnifier, and show the full screen

Organization is the name of the game, when keeping track of files/folders on your computer. Any computer, Any operating system, it doesn’t matter, if you have tens of thousands of files, they need to be organized. Typically these are organized is some sort of nested fashion. If you don’t use folders, then you end up with hundreds or possible thousands of files in the same place, and things just get harder to find.

Think about your Downloads directory. Everything you download get’s stuffed into the same directory. Think about the ease of having a Utils directory, or maybe a PDFs directory.

Now I’m getting side tracked, but the bottom line is … you’ll need to create folders, and here is a little keyboard shortcut that makes life a tiny little bit easier.

If you’re a KB junkie, save your time on the video, the trick is [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[N] in any Explorer window/dialog (including File | Save, Save As).