Since Windows 7 was launched, our team is a big fan of the new taskbar and its features. Working with it seriously improves your productivity compared with all previous versions of Windows. In this article we will continue to talk about it and share a roundup of tips & shortcuts which will further improve your productivity. You will learn things like: how to control the position of taskbar icons, preview contents of windows without opening them, use the keyboard to navigate between opened windows and many other tips.

We will continue our series on customizing the appearance of Windows 7 with an article about logon screens. Even though now you can customize lots of visual elements directly from the Control Panel, you still cannot change the logon screen. As with previous versions of Windows, you need to use third-party tools for this task. In this guide I will show which tools you can use for changing the logon screen, to work with them and also share a few download locations.

I will continue our series about to customizing visual aspects in Windows 7 with an article in which I will share some of the most interesting themes which can be found online. Even though there aren't too many great locations for downloading such themes, you can still find some good looking ones to download and install. At the end of the article I'll also show you how to install the themes you download.

At the installation of Windows 7 you are prompted for your country and language. Based on your selection, a group of themes will be installed. Apart from that, Windows 7 will copy on your hard disk some additional hidden themes that you aren't aware of. There are a few hidden themes, considered by Microsoft to be regional themes which aren't accessible in the default list of installed themes. For example, for English distributions of Windows 7 you have themes for countries such as Australia, Canada, South Africa, Great Britain and the US. From this list, only one will be visible in your Personalize Control Panel, depending on the selections you made. I will continue our series on personalizing Windows 7 with an article in which I will show you which are the hidden themes in Windows 7, where to find them on your computer and how to install them.

I will continue our series about customizing the visual aspects of your Windows 7 with an article on how to customize your themes. Compared to previous versions of Windows, in Windows 7 you no longer have to hack your system to have it look the way you want to. Now you can easily customize lots of aspects such as: the desktop backgrounds used by a theme, the sound scheme, window color, transparency, screensaver, etc. Also, you can easily create your own themes, install new ones, without any technical knowledge of files that need to be hacked, etc.

After we wrote about how to pin any folder to the taskbar, I decided to search the Internet for a way to make custom Jump Lists. Fortunately I managed to find an application that can do this, called Jumplist-Launcher. This is a free tool, created by Ali Dunnpfiff, which can be pinned down on your taskbar and allows you to create a custom Jump List for it. In this tutorial I will show you how to install JumpList Launcher, how to add an item, folder or group and how to modify your custom jump list.

One of the areas where Windows 7 noticeably improves things versus Windows XP & Windows Vista is visual customization. With this article, we will start a small series about this area. First, we will show what's new in terms of changing your desktop background. This includes how to personalize your desktop background, set one or multiple pictures as wallpapers, how to set Windows 7 to automatically change them at desired intervals and in the order you desire. I'll also show what options you have in terms of positioning your wallpapers on the screen and share a few good sources of free wallpapers.

Since we started writing about it, we said that the new taskbar is one of the best features in Windows 7. It has some very interesting new features & improvements which definitely boost user productivity compared to older versions of Windows. Therefore it is only natural for us to continue our series of articles about it. In this article, I'll show how to further customize different aspects of the taskbar such as: its appearance, size, location and toolbars.

In one of our previous articles we explained how to pin down to the taskbar a generic folder. In this article, I will show how to pin to the taskbar special Windows folders like Libraries, Computer, Network or even specific items from Control Panel or Administrative Tools.

Shortly after we published our article about the Windows 7 taskbar, one of our readers asked us for a way to pin a folder to the taskbar. After a bit of research I found a way to accomplish this task. Therefore, in this article, I am going to show how to pin any folder to the taskbar and how to change its default icon.

One of the great things about Windows 7 is the fact that it has a very strong visual personality. It includes a very diverse set of wallpapers from a long list of visual artists. The funny thing is, the wallpapers which our team likes best are all created by one photographer. His name is Will Austin and we were very fortunate to have him as a guest in this interview. If you want to know more about him and how he managed to get on the desktop of millions of people, don't hesitate to read our conversation.

The Start Menu is one of the elements which remained unchanged for many versions of Windows. Windows Vista was the first to introduce some major redesign choices, some more inspired than others. Windows 7 marks another evolution but, this time, changes are more subtle. There are a small number of new features and many fixes for the less inspired changes introduced by Windows Vista. In this article I will start with an overview of the new features, improvements and changes done in the Windows 7 Start Menu. Then I'll show you how to launch the Start Menu settings window, change the default action of the power button, how to enable or disable recent items and programs, how to change the number of recent items and programs shown, how to customize the icons and menus from the Start Menu and how to pin items to the Start Menu and Jump Lists.