Ease of Access

The Games panel in Windows 7 is pretty awesome but it does have one issue: after you install and uninstall a few games, you can end-up having leftover shortcuts that are no longer valid and cannot be removed with ease. If you encounter this problem, this guide shows a few ways to remove these invalid shortcuts.

The Games folder is a Windows 7 feature that few people are aware of, let alone understand its complete functionality. This article will try to demystify it and explain in detail what it is, how it works and how it can be customized.

Do you want to launch any executable file by the press of a few keys on your keyboard, without having to use the mouse? Do you want to do this without installing any third party tools in Windows? There a few ways you can make this work, even if you don’t have a keyboard with programmable keys, by using default Windows functionality. This tutorial shows two ways you can do this in Windows.

Having a dual-monitor configuration gives you a pretty good productivity improvement but introduces a few annoyances you don’t have when working on a single monitor. For example, it is more likely for your mouse cursor to slip to the second screen when all you want to do is close the active application window or press the Show Desktop button on the taskbar. How do you fix this? We’ve got a solution inspired by a discussion on Reddit.

I have to admit that I hadn’t used any kind of speech recognition in a long time when I was asked to do the tutorials. The last time I had tried speech recognition, it was with Dragon Dictate, which was new when Windows 98 was also new. A very long time ago in computer years!

I was happy to tackle this subject because I was very interested to see how speech recognition has improved. And boy, has it improved! Even a basic, built-in application like this did an amazingly good job "right out of the box." In this final article about Speech Recognition, I’d like to talk about what I learned while reacquainting myself with the wonders of speech recognition, and where I’ll be going from here.

In the previous tutorials about Speech Recognition you learned how to set up this application and the basics of using it. Speech Recognition does work surprisingly well "right out of the box," and it’s quite sophisticated for a built-in application. However, this is not to say that it is foolproof. Let’s take a look at some of the common problems in Speech Recognition, and how to fix them.

The speech recognition software in Windows 7 is surprisingly sophisticated. Microsoft built into it a lot of features that, at one time, were only available in expensive third-party speech recognition software. Speech Recognition is easy to use, but as with all sophisticated software, you’ll need to learn a few basics before you can talk with your computer as fluently as you talk with your friends. The basics include: how to start Speech Recognition, common commands, inputting text, making corrections and browsing the web.