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.

Computer speech recognition has been around for a long time, and many people have heard of programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking. What many people may not know is that Windows 7 includes its own, very capable, speech recognition program. We plan to cover it in detail in a couple of articles. But first, let’s see how to set it up, in order for it to work.

It can happen that you quickly need open more than one window of the same application. It can be any application: a Windows application such as Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer, or a third-party application like Mozilla Firefox. Opening multiple windows is the same as running multiple instances of the same application. Let’s see how this is done.

I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people using typed commands to start tools, run scripts or administrative tasks in Windows, instead of using the mouse. For them, the Command Prompt and the Run window are really useful. However, if the Command Prompt will always be useful, no matter how user interfaces evolve, does it make sense to still use the Run window? Here’s what I think and I’m hoping you agree with me.

If you need to type without a keyboard, Windows 7’s on-screen keyboard function might be helpful. It allows you to type by using a mouse. You can even set up and use this function without having a keyboard connected to your computer, which can be useful if your keyboard is unavailable. This article will explain how to access the on-screen keyboard, how to operate it, how to use it to log on to a password-protected user account without the use of a physical keyboard, and how to use several of it’s options including the predictive text function.

Lately we have been receiving questions about how to pin shortcuts to applications which include custom command line parameters. People want to start their favorite programs (Firefox, Foobar, Internet Explorer, etc) using custom parameters which make them run in specific ways. This guide will show how simple it is to create and pin shortcuts, which include command line arguments, to the taskbar or the Start Menu.

There are times when you need an easy way to access items such as folders, files or web pages. One way to access them easily is to create shortcuts to these items. This tutorial will teach you how to create shortcuts to all kinds of items, so that you can create your own system of easy to access items.

One of the things we noticed about some Windows 7 users is that they do not use the Shut down button from the Start Menu to shut down their computers. They use the power button from the computer case instead. If you are such a user, you might want to change the default behavior of the Shut down button from the Start Menu into something else, which you are likely to use in a reasonably frequent manner: Log Off, Lock, Restart, Sleep or Switch User. This tutorial will show how.

Windows 7 provides a very useful tool called Magnifier which allows you to enlarge different parts of the screen. You will be able to see the whole screen more easily by using different magnification levels and types of views. In this article you will learn how to open this tool, use it, configure it to fit your needs and, finally, how to set it to start at your computer startup.

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.

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.

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.