NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, February 2011
Discovering Windows 7 – Part 10
By Neil Stahfest, Vice President,
Tacoma Area PC User Group, Washington
November 2010 issue, the Data Line
http://www.tapcug.org
NCStahfest (at) msn.com (click to email author)

You’ve had your computer for a while and you’re happy (or at least content) with the way it works. You insert a music CD and the Windows Media Player automatically plays your music. You go to your Pictures library and you see your photographs with Windows the Photo Gallery (or a similar program). Then, one day, something changes. Some other program is playing your music or displaying your pictures and you don’t like it. You tried some new program and it hijacked your settings. It’s an old story and if it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. So what can you do when it happens?

Windows 7 makes it very easy to set the way your computer connects with various devices (cameras, iPhone, DVDs, etc.) and media to reclaim your settings. All you have to do is click on “Start”, when the Search Box appears type “AutoPlay”. Next, click on “AutoPlay” at the top of the window.

You should now see the AutoPlay control window. Note, there should be a small check box in the upper right corner that will turn off all AutoPlay functions. If the check mark is missing, left-click on the box to make one.

This window shows all of the functions that you can control with AutoPlay. You’ll need to scroll down to see the full list. If you click on an AutoPlay selection (such as “DVD movie” as the illustration shows) you’ll see a list off all of the alternative programs plus additional actions such as “Take no action”. Just select the program or action you want to activate to use and then click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the window. In the example above, I selected “Play DVD using HP QuickPlay”. Now HP QuickPlay will be used when I insert a DVD movie disk.

Taskbar “previews” are another new Windows 7 feature. Whenever you open an application a window (such as a Word document or your Internet browser) an icon appears on the Taskbar. If you open two or more documents or browser windows, additional icons appear as stacked icons on top of the original, sort of like stacked cards. When you move your mouse pointer over the icon(s) a very small preview of the window appears as shown here. This can be really useful if you have two or more documents or Internet browser windows open at the same time. Pointing at a window causes the full sized version to temporarily appear in your main window. Also, while pointing at the preview window, a red box appears in the upper right corner that will let you close the window and its contents. Clicking on a preview window causes the contents of that window to become the active window. This can be a convenient way to select and copy portions of one or more documents into another document.

Of course there is a downside to this feature. Just as with previous versions of Windows, when you open multiple windows at the same time, the additional windows draw on your computer’s resources. This preview feature places an even greater demand on your computer’s memory and CPU. Older computers and computers without a lot of RAM will become less responsive and slow down. This is one reason why Microsoft recommends at least 3 gigabytes of RAM on computers that run Windows 7. Fortunately there is a simple solution to this problem. You can either remember to keep fewer tabs open at the same time or turn off your web browser’s tab function.

Click here to return to top



==================================================================