Windows 7 New, Improved Applications and Services

Windows 7 makes numerous additions to its applications and services arsenal, including the following:

• Multitouch support—Vista added Tablet PC support for Business, Enterprise, Home Premium, and Ultimate Editions. Windows 7 builds on this platform with support for Multitouch, a way to use visual gestures on touchscreens to instruct Windows 7 what to do, and how to behave. To better understand this capability, watch the Microsoft video demo at http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=8700c7ff-546f-4e1d-85f7-65659dd1f14f.

• PowerShell 2.0—PowerShell is a scripting language that you can use to automate just about anything that Windows can do, especially at the command line. With Vista, you can download and install PowerShell 1.1 from the Windows Download Center; PowerShell 2.0—which is both more powerful and more flexible than 1.x versions—is bundled as part of Windows 7. Check out the PowerShell Pro demo at www.powershellpro.com/powershell-tutorial-introduction for all the details.

• Windows Live access—Whereas earlier versions of Windows, including both XP and Vista, included e-mail, messaging, photo handling, and address book functionality as part of the OS, Windows 7 pushes all this functionality onto the Internet. Although registration is required, you can use Windows Live for all kinds of activities for free. Check it out at http://home.live.com.

• Windows XP Mode—For compatibility with legacy applications that work in Windows XP, users of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate can all download the free Windows XP Mode package. It not only provides a tailored version of Microsoft Virtual PC with a pre-fab Windows XP virtual hard disk (VHD), it also provides a free license for the XP OS you run inside that machine. Designed to make it easy to run older applications that don’t work on Vista or Windows 7, this utility makes it easy to keep older code operational in a virtual machine.

• WordPad—This venerable alternative to Microsoft Word comes free with modern Windows versions and gets a complete makeover in Windows 7. Whereas the older versions let you read and work with DOC files, this latest version also understands XML-based formats (DOCX) and provides a ribbon interface that looks and behaves very much like (a stripped-down version of) Word 2007.

Source of Information : QUE Microsoft Windows in Depth