She said there was just a little bit of adjustment for some of the user-interface changes,  but there was nothing real major for her that she used on a regular basis.

I still haven’t played around with it too much, but what I have I’ve liked. Things seem to be organized more intuitively over all. It’s still a slight adjustment after running with Windows XP for so many years. I didn’t really have the transition to Vista as I never installed it on my main machine.

My wife said she does see a noticeable difference in overall startup and shutdown speeds with Windows 7 for sure. She can also notice an increase in speed while working in and using multiple programs. Multi-tasking happens even more fluidly with the improved memory management between applications.

I still want to really look into the file management and file organization tools that are available now in Window 7.

Post from: EveryJoe

Follow-up on Windows 7

Today I was doing some work and my brother wanted me to email him the social media icon graphics I’d created for a website client. Since I was sending a large group of files I just opened the folder and clicked on all of the files he requested.

I then selected the "Send To Mail Recipient" option and an email was immediately created with all of the files attached. What was new to me, and something I really liked was that it also generated boilerplate text to include in the email. Including a text list of all the files attached.

I think this was a very helpful feature to have and I’m not sure why I never realized this existed or I hadn’t seen it before now.

What I’d like to figure out and learn how to do now would be to change the text that’s included by default in the boilerplate text.

Post from: EveryJoe

Send to "Mail Recipient" Functionality That’s New to Me

What will happen is that I’ll click on a file or collection of files and normally try to send them to another folder location or copy them to move them somewhere else.

Normally, as soon as I right-click on the files to access the right-click menu, the system stops responding. I’ve determined lately that if I immediately go to Task Manager and stop the offending process my system recovers and I’m able to continue working.

If I let the system sit a little too long after that, under the impression that it’s working, it apparently locks up some other processes and goes into a loop of various application no longer responding to any input from me. If things get to that point, I normally have to manually kill a variety of processes and then manually restart the Explorer.exe application to recover Windows and begin working again.

What’s weird is that some of this is very familiar to what I believe my wife has been experiencing on her Vista laptop.

Anyone else experiencing this? I’m wondering if there’s some kind of Windows update that’s been released over the last couple of weeks that may have caused these issues for me on my Windows XP Pro machine.

Post from: EveryJoe

File Explorer Regularly Locking Computer

What I’ve done is customize the “Send To” menu that’s available from the right-click context menu. My customizations allow me to right-click on any file and quickly send the file to another destination folder for saving, storage or organization.

Customizing the menu is fairly easy, you can just follow the instructions below:

1. Create a shortcut on your desktop to the location/folder where you want to be able to quickly send files.
2. Open the following path C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\SendTo
3. Move the shortcuts you created in Step 1 above into the folder opened in Step 2

That’s it!

You’re done.

Now you have shortcuts to your preferred folders now available in the “Send To” menu available when you right-click on a file. Any location you find yourself normally sending files to regularly can be added to the list. You can even create shortcuts to network locations as well if you desire. If you put a shortcut to the executable for a program you can send a file to be opened into that program.

I use this customization on a daily basis. Hopefully you’ll find it as handy as I do.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Customize Your “Send To” Menu

Photo from Stock Exchange

This isn’t a massively different way of thinking thatn what we’ve seen before in both Windows XP and Windows Vista with the My Music and My Pictures folders. The different way of looking at this file relationship though is that when you would open your My Music and My Pictures folders you were opening a single folder and looking at a group of files that were more than likely put there be the user.

The new functionality of libraries is that these groups of files exist only at the time they’re really used. When you open a library of files you’re seeing all the files of that type , regardless of where the file is physically located on the drive.

Obviously a better way to organize files is to make it almost mindless for the end-user. In addition there are times when you don’t want to put all of your similar files in the same place on your hard drive. You want to keep files together that are related to each other for a number of other reasons besides the type of file it is.

Post from: EveryJoe

Reviewing Windows 7 Libraries Feature

There are a few limitations or annoyances if you’re not a paid user. You need to wait a certain amount of time before downloading (usually less than 2 minutes), you can’t download more than one file at a time and the zinger is that you need to fill out a CAPTCHA in order to download files.

CAPTCHAs are not usually a bad thing except when you can’t read it! RapidShare requires you to choose the graphics that contain a cat but they are both difficult to read and worse off, not everyone knows what a cat looks like. It usually takes me two or three tries to download. I understand that they want to make it so that people need to make sure they’re human before they can download but their CAPTCHA requires a user to be super-human. That’s not a good way to draw in more people.

Security is important but this type of security is ridiculous.

Post from: EveryJoe

How secure is too secure? Oh yeah, this is it.