Introduction
Performance Improvements - Windows 7 has been designed to be more nimble and less memory hungry, it also has improved sleep and resume so you can get working more quickly
Easier Wireless Networking - It is now even easier to stay connected to networks on your laptop wherever you go, simply click the icon on the taskbar and your connections (Broadband, Wi-Fi, GPRS, Dial-Up, VPN etc) all appear in one place
Power Management Improvements - With improvements to background activities, automatic screen dimming, less power hungry DVD playback and automatic disabling of unused ports, Windows 7 is designed to help your battery last longer
Full Support For New Faster 64-bit Computers - A lot of new computers are coming with 64-bit processors which put simply can handle larger amounts of information than a 32-bit system and support more RAM making the system more responsive when running lots of programs at once, Windows 7 has full support for 64-bit
Cool new features
Aero Shake - Handy if you have several windows open and want to minimize all but the one you are using, simply click on the top of the open window and jiggle your mouse side to side and all other windows except this one will minimize, jiggle again and they return
Aero Peek - By hovering your mouse over the new Show Desktop icon at the right hand end of your taskbar all windows turn transparent allowing you to easily see what is on your desktop, you can also hover over any other minimized windows by hovering the mouse pointer over its icon on the taskbar to display a small preview of that window
Snap - A quick and easy way to resize and position windows simply by dragging them to the edge of the screen, drag to top of screen to maximize, back down again to return to original size, you can also drag to left or right of the screen to make it expand vertically allowing you to easily position two windows side by side
Items removed from Windows 7
Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Mail (known as Outlook Express in Windows XP) are no longer included in Windows 7, they have been replaced with Windows Live Essentials which can be downloaded free of charge from the Microsoft website - http://download.live.com/
Versions of Windows 7 sold in the UK will also not have Internet Explorer installed by default (due to competition rules in Europe) - it can still however be downloaded and installed free of charge from the Microsoft website, or an alternative browser such as Firefox could be installed instead - these competition rules do not apply to computer manufacturers so you will find that most computers will have it installed anyway or at least supply it on a CD with the computer
