With XP on its march to the gallows, Microsoft is busy developing and fine tuning their latest operating system, Windows 7. While users are getting a hang of W7, internet rumour mill is abuzz with Windows 8 on 2012! Though W7 is rated to be faster with lots of cool features and a glitzy interface, it needs a lot of modifications, although it is alot better than Vista which was a total failure,However, there are some utilities that are useful in Windows 7 which I would love to see in XP.
God Mode
There are hundreds of settings in an operating system and Windows 7 is no exception.By turning on the ‘God Mode’, you could bring 270 of these settings to one place.
To turn on this mode, create a folder anywhere you like and name it: God mode.{ED7BA470-8E54465E-825C-99712043E01C}. You must exclude the period quoted at the end. The resulting folder will include 270 items, which will represent every configurable option in Windows 7.
Wordpad File Support
Windows 7’s Wordpad utility is capable of opening the newer files created by Word 2007 and 2010. The Wordpad utility shipped with Windows Vista was quite restricted due to its limited file support which was for RTF (Rich Text Format) and TXT (Plain Text). Still it does not recognize the DOC file format which was created by Word 2003 and its predecessors.
However, it does recognize ODT (Open Document Text) files created by the OpenOffice Word Processor. We all know that Wordpad doesn’t understand complex formatting and is never a replacement for the word processor software. But it will still help you to read a document though the corresponding software is not installed.
Win 7 Reliability Monitor
All computer users, at one time or another, will rack their brains to understand why their PC’s don’t act as they should. Windows 7 has a handy utility which might help. From the Start menu, search for the term ‘reliability’ and then run the ‘View Reliability History’. You’ll be presented with a graph of the system’s ‘Stability Index’ over a period of weeks and days. It displays which programmes or components crashed on a given day, which will help you to pinpoint the problem.
Problem Steps Recorder
There are many instances where PC users need expert assistance to keep the system running smoothly. And remote support is the best option. But when there is no Internet connectivity or the connection is too slow, Problem Steps Recorder comes to the rescue.
You need to do a search in the Start menu with the term ‘psr’ in order to find this handy utility. When executed, it will start recording your activities. It will take screenshots and add captions to these, to show where exactly you clicked and pressed. There is also the capability of adding annotations and comments.
When recording is stopped, everything will be put into MHTML format (this is a web page archive format used to combine resources that are typically represented by external links (such as images, Flash animations, Java applets, audio files) together with HTML code into a single file) and zipped. You can even email this file to a technician of your choice to identify and fix the problem.
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