Book I Chapter 5 Getting Essentials: The Rest of Windows 7 67 Inventorying the Essentials That means 6 or 7 of the new Live Essentials weren’t so essential back in the prehistoric days of Vista. Take it all with a grain of salt, okay? Here’s how I figure it. Almost every Windows 7 user will want three of the Windows Live Essentials:  ✦ Windows Live Photo Gallery: Shown in Figure 5-1, it runs rings around the Start➪Pictures photo handling capabilities of native Windows 7. If you do anything with pictures — they don’t have to be photos — it’s worth your while to download and use Windows Live Photo Gallery to retrieve, tag, display, and manage your photos. (It works with Windows 7, Vista, and XP, although you need Windows 7 to get the full effects of the Picture Library. It’s billed as a replacement for the Windows Vista Photo Gallery.) Figure 5-1: Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you retrieve, tag, display, and manage photos or any other types of picture files.  ✦ Windows Live Sync: When you install Windows Live Photo Gallery, you also receive a copy of this full-featured folder synchronizer with a nascent interface. Microsoft bought the FolderShare program from ByteTaxi, Inc., in late 2005, added a user interface of sorts, and bundled the result with Windows Live Photo Gallery. Et voilà. You can synchro- nize pictures across different PCs or folders with just a few clicks. See Book IV, Chapter 5 for the lowdown on Windows Live Photo Gallery.  ✦ Windows Live Movie Maker: For anyone who ever plays with video clips — indeed, anybody who wants to make a slide show without using 68 Inventorying the Essentials PowerPoint, this program (see Figure 5-2) is well worth the download. Or at least it will be worth the download, once Microsoft has fleshed it out a bit. Not as capable as the commercial video editing programs, it’s still easy to use. And, it integrates well with Windows Live Photo Gallery. (Windows Live Movie Maker works on Vista and Windows 7. It’s a replacement for the notoriously buggy and wimpy Vista Movie Maker.) Figure 5-2: Windows Live Movie Maker lets you edit and stitch together clips like a pro. See Book IV, Chapter 6 for more information about Windows Live Movie Maker. In addition, many Windows 7 users will want two more Windows Live Essentials:  ✦ Windows Live Messenger is the latest incarnation in a long line of Messengers, including MSN Messenger, .NET Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, and Windows Messenger. Now equipped with funny, rumbling icons for your chatting edification; easy voice and video capabilities; group chats (complete with home pages and group calen- dars); mobile phone tie-ins; and contact-harvesting capabilities with Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, and Tagged, this ain’t your grandfa- ther’s Messenger. Windows Live Messenger now works with Yahoo! Messenger, so your Yahoo! friends can chat with you, and you with them. Windows Live Messenger works with any version of Windows. Book I Chapter 5 Getting Essentials: The Rest of Windows 7 69 Inventorying the Essentials When you install Windows Live Messenger, something appears on your Start menu — Windows Live Call. As best I can tell, Windows Live Call isn’t a program, Essential or not. It’s just a hook into Windows Live Messenger that lets Messenger act like Skype. In other words, you can click Live Call to make a long distance phone call over the Internet to another person with Messenger or to someone’s landline or mobile phone. See Book V, Chapter 7 for more information on Windows Live Messenger.  ✦ Windows Live Mail is the latest incarnation in a long line of free Microsoft mail programs that run on your computer. (If you don’t have a reliable Internet connection, it may be better than Hotmail or Gmail.) If you’ve ever used Outlook Express (in Windows XP and earlier) or Windows Mail (which is almost identical to Outlook Express, in Windows Vista) or Windows Live Mail Desktop (a discarded name for the same thing), you’ve seen the progenitors of Windows Live Mail. Hotmail (er, Windows Live Hotmail) is different: For starters, it runs in your Web browser, not directly on your PC. Outlook is different, too: It costs money. Windows Live Mail (see Figure 5-3) not only grabs your “regular” e-mail but can also grab mail from your Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL mail accounts. Figure 5-3: Windows Live Mail rates as a reasonably good, free mail program. See Book V, Chapter 6 for more about Windows Live Mail. Windows Live Essentials includes six additional components. I have no idea why Microsoft calls them Essentials. The list changes from time to time, but as of this writing, these are the six essential programs that few Windows 7 users will want: 70 Inventorying the Essentials  ✦ Windows Live Writer helps you write entries for your blog and post them, as long as you use one of the big-name services or products for your blog: Blogger, Live Journal, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, or (shudder!) the Microsoft SharePoint blog. Because the blogging service you’re most likely to use — Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress, in particular — all have decent editors, it’s hard to imagine why you would want to add another program in the middle of things. Word 2007 has a Publish As Blog option, if you feel like using a Bentley to do a Festiva job.  ✦ Windows Live Family Safety presents the latest version of the Microsoft Web site and chat-blocking and -tracking software. It replaces the Family Safety features of Windows XP and Vista and the Family Safety component of Windows Live OneCare. The people involved work hard to make the Internet a safe place for kids to learn and play. Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, the job they’ve undertaken is intractable beyond a certain point. The American Academy of Pediatrics has an excellent overview of the challenges, and a lot of resource material, at safetynet.aap.org.  ✦ Windows Live Toolbar — “Oh, goodie! Look, Mildred — another toolbar!” This one replaces the old MSN Search Toolbar, as though you missed it. Now you can make sure that you have both Microsoft Live and Windows Live Search available all the time — as long as you’re using Internet Explorer (IE) and haven’t upgraded to a better Web browser. How on earth anybody could call this an Essential boggles my mind. It works with any version of Windows, as long as you have (the toxic) IE 6 or later.  ✦ Microsoft Office Outlook (MOO) Connector rates as essential because, uh, well, because Microsoft says it is. MOO Connector lets you down- load your Hotmail messages in Outlook 2003 and 2007. No, Hotmail isn’t essential. No, Outlook 2003 and 2007 aren’t essential. But the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector is like, totally, absolutely essential. Microsoft used to post instructions for hooking Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 into Hotmail (support.microsoft.com/kb/287424). The instruc- tions are gone, replaced by a link to this essential product. Progress.  ✦ Microsoft Office Live Add-In puts a new toolbar in Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 (“Oh, goodie! Look, Mildred. . . .”). The toolbar’s purpose is to “extend your Microsoft Office experience to the Web.” (No, I don’t make this stuff up.) Your experience is extended by the capability to save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents directly to Microsoft Office Live Workspace. I have no idea why this feature is essential to Windows 7 users. Some days, enlightenment eludes me.  ✦ Microsoft Silverlight represents Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Adobe Flash Player in the Web animation player market. You already have Flash Player — about 98 percent of all PCs do — and I can’t think of a single good reason why you would want the Microsoft replacement. The Microsoft Silverlight site, www.microsoft.com/silverlight, Book I Chapter 5 Getting Essentials: The Rest of Windows 7 71 Distinguishing Essentials from the Other Live Components says that Silverlight offers a “seamless adaptive streaming experience” that you can, uh, you can, er, oh, never mind. The site advertises “the new MSN toolbar,” so you can tell that these guys are (not) up-to-date. Essential? Meh. That’s the score. Of 11 Windows Live Essentials (this week, anyway), 2 are winners, 1 comes along for the ride, 2 may be useful for Windows 7 custom- ers, and 6 aren’t worth the bits to blast them to Ballmer. Distinguishing Essentials from the Other Live Components If you think that somebody came up with the list of Windows Live Essentials on the back of a cocktail napkin, well, you aren’t alone. Before there were Essentials, Microsoft had already brought together a bunch of disparate pro- grams and emblazoned them with the Windows Live brand. So that you don’t get confused, I list some of the Windows Live programs you may know. None of them is part of Windows Live Essentials (at least, not this week). None of them is a program that you download and run on your computer. You may want to use one or all of the Windows Live collection, but I don’t discuss them in detail in this book. Here’s the list:  ✦ Windows Live Hotmail (hotmail.com), formerly just plain Hotmail and MSN Mail before that, offers a good-quality, free online e-mail serv- ice, comparable to Gmail (mail.google.com) or Yahoo! Mail (mail. yahoo.com). Think of it this way: The Windows Live Mail program runs on your com- puter; if you use it, your mail is stored on your computer. Windows Live Hotmail runs on the Internet — you can get to it by typing hotmail.com in a Web browser; if you use Hotmail, your mail is kept on the Internet.  ✦ Windows Live Spaces (spaces.live.com), formerly MSN Spaces, offers free social networking with a bit of blogging. It sorta competes with Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and MySpace as a social networking site.  ✦ Windows Live SkyDrive (skydrive.live.com) gives you as much as 25GB of free online storage.  ✦ Windows Live Profile, Groups, Events, and Calendar give you online contacts, scheduling, and the like. If the Windows Live lineup doesn’t inspire you, check back again in a few years. Microsoft will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the Live bucket. 72 Installing Essentially Installing Essentially Want to install a couple of Live-ly ones? Here’s how to get the Windows Live Essentials you want — and let the others sit and stew: 1. Choose Start➪Getting Started➪Get Windows Live Essentials. Windows 7 fires up (what else?) Internet Explorer and sends you to the Live Essentials download page, download.live.com. Alternatively, you can use any browser you like and go to the same page. 2. Click the Download button on the right. Choose to Save the file. The Windows Live Installer is transferred to your computer. 3. Double-click the installer or do whatever you need to do (depending on your browser) to run it. You see the Windows Live Installer, shown in Figure 5-4. Figure 5-4: Pick the Essentials programs that are essential for you. 4. Take a look at the list in the first section of this chapter and choose the Windows Live Essentials that strike your fancy. Click Install. In Figure 5-4, I choose Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker. Your mileage may vary. The Windows Live Installer churns Book I Chapter 5 Getting Essentials: The Rest of Windows 7 73 Installing Essentially away for a while, and then comes back with a set of check boxes that ask you to set your search provider and home page and to “help improve Windows Live.” 5. Deselect all the check boxes and then click Continue. Here’s what Microsoft is trying to get you to agree to: If you select the first check box, the installer downloads the Choice Guard program, which changes the default search engine in both Internet Explorer and Firefox to Microsoft’s own Live Search. (You can change the search engine anytime you like — see Book V, Chapter 2.) I find it creepy that Choice Guard looks for programs on your computer that might automatically change the default search engine to something else, and nullifies them, to ensure that Live Search is set as the default and stays there. Programs that change the default search engine are scummy by definition. Choice Guard protects against such scum — but only if you pick Windows Live Search as your default search engine. If you select the second check box, the installer downloads Choice Guard and sets both the Firefox and Internet Explorer home pages to msn.com. Golly, that’s just the home page I always wanted. (See Book V, Chapter 2 to change it yourself.) Once again, Choice Guard roots out and nullifies any scummy competing programs that might change the home page back. Microsoft says that Choice Guard runs only once, so if you change your default search engine or home page, it doesn’t come back to haunt you. The final check box lets you send all your Windows usage history, browser history, lists of songs you listen to and videos you watch, and just about anything else you do to Mother Microsoft so that the com- pany can improve Windows Live. Ya gotta be kidding, right? 6. When the final panel asks you to sign up for a Windows Live ID, ignore what it says and click Close. If you have a Hotmail ID, a Messenger ID, or an Xbox Online ID, you already have a Windows Live ID. If you don’t have one yet, follow the directions in Book V, Chapter 7 to get an anonymous Windows Live ID. The Windows Live Essentials you chose are installed and ready to use. In fact, Windows Live Messenger is so pushy that you immediately see the sign- in screen, and if you click the X box to close Messenger, it informs you that it will continue to run so that you can be alerted if somebody tries to send you a message. Microsoft. You gotta love it. 74 Book I: Cranking Up Windows 7 Book II Windows 7 Boot Camp Contents at a Glance Chapter 1: Running Windows from Start to Finish 77 A Few Quick Steps to Make the Desktop Your Own 77 Mousing with Your Mouse 83 Starting with the Start Button 86 Touching on the Taskbar 89 Working with Files and Folders 91 Getting Around 104 Arranging Libraries 108 Creating Shortcuts 110 Sleep: Perchance to Dream 111 Chapter 2: Controlling Users 115 Logging On 116 Choosing Account Types 118 Controlling User Account Control 121 Adding Users 124 Enabling the Guest Account 125 Changing Accounts 126 Switching Users 130 Chapter 3: Maintaining Your System 133 Coping with Start-Up Problems 133 Working with Backups 138 Maintaining Drives 152 Using System Restore and Restore Points 155 Scheduling the Task Scheduler 158 Zipping and Compressing 162 Using the Windows 7 Resource Monitor and Reliability Monitor 166 Controlling the Control Panel 167 Chapter 4: Getting the Basic Stuff Done 173 Burning CDs and DVDs 173 Improving Your Experience Index 186 Getting Word Processing — Free 191 Taming the Character Map 196 Calculating — Free 197 Painting 198 Sticking Sticky Notes 200 Using Sneaky Key Commands 200 Chapter 5: Troubleshooting and Getting Help 205 Troubleshooting in the Action Center 206 Tracking Your System’s Stability 207 Tackling Windows Help and Support 208 How to Really Get Help 211 Snapping and Recording Your Problems 213 Connecting to Remote Assistance 216 Getting Help on the Web 222 [...]... Running Windows from Start to Finish In This Chapter ✓ Moving around the desktop ✓ Working with windows (windows with a wittle w) ✓ Stepping through the wondrous Taskbar ✓ Organizing files and folders ✓ Showing filename extensions ✓ Using libraries to extend your reach ✓ To sleep, perchance to dream T his chapter explains how to find your way around the Windows windows If you’re an old hand at Windows, ... looking at the Documents library on your computer and you can’t see the period and three-letter suffixes of the filenames (such as doc and xls and jpg) that are visible in Figure 1- 12, don’t panic! You need to tell Windows to show them — electronically knock Windows upside the head, if you will In my opinion, every single Windows 7 user should force Windows to show full filenames, including the (usually... piecemeal help in keeping things organized Now, using the Windows 7 libraries, and a Search function that (finally!) works the way you would expect, you stand a fighting chance of finding that long-lost file, especially if you’re diligent in assigning tags to pictures and videos See the section “Arranging Libraries,” later in this chapter Book II Chapter 1 Running Windows from Start to Finish A file... who is in the kitchen (For more details, and important information about Public networks and bigcompany domains, check out Networking All- In- One For Dummies, by Doug Lowe [Wiley].) Follow these easy steps to move a file or folder from one of the built -in libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, or Videos) into its corresponding location in one of the \Public folders: 1 Use Windows Explorer by choosing... that are recognized on the Windows 7 computer before you can get into the \Public folder Figure 1-18: To get into a Windows 7 computer’s Book II Chapter 1 \Public Running Windows from Start to Finish folder, provide a recognized username and password I say usually because there’s one trick: If you set up an administrator account on both the Windows XP computer and the Windows 7 computer, both with the... (see Figure 1-11) I go into detail in Book III, Chapter 2 Hover the mouse over a taskbar icon to see thumbnails Figure 1-11: The Windows 7 Taskbar lets you pinpoint what’s running and jump to the right location quickly Subtle lines to the right indicate a program is running Running Windows from Start to Finish Windows 7 makes the changes immediately Book II Chapter 1 90 Touching on the Taskbar Although... folder from the network See Book VII, Chapter 1 for details The Windows 7 ability to establish sharing permissions for individual folders on your PC gives you much finer control You can assign fine-grained permissions for your HomeGroup, or for individual users with Windows 7 built -in permission levels, which come in two flavors: ✦ Read allows the chosen individuals or groups to open or copy the file,... mickeys What’s up, Dock? Windows 7 includes several “gesture” features that can save you a lot of time Foremost among them: a half-window docking capability that Microsoft insists on calling Aero Snap If you click the title bar of a window and drag the window a-a -all the way to the left side of the screen, as soon as the mouse hits the edge of the screen, Windows 7 resizes the window so that it occupies... you need to know the username and password for an account on the Windows 7 computer before you can get into its \Public folders Working with Files and Folders 101 If you have a Windows 7 computer that’s attached to a HomeGroup and you try to access the \Public folder on that Windows 7 computer from Windows XP, you usually see a challenge like the one shown in Figure 1-18 You have to provide a username... background Start taking your destiny into your own hands by changing the wallpaper (er, the desktop background) If you bought a new computer with Windows 7 installed, your background text probably says Dell or Vaio or Billy Joe Bob’s Computer Emporium / Dial 555- 376 5 for a good time Bah Change your wallpaper by following these steps (note that Windows 7 Starter Edition owners can’t change the wallpaper): . Stability 2 07 Tackling Windows Help and Support 20 8 How to Really Get Help 21 1 Snapping and Recording Your Problems 21 3 Connecting to Remote Assistance 21 6 Getting Help on the Web 22 2 Chapter. hundreds of millions of dollars into the Live bucket. 72 Installing Essentially Installing Essentially Want to install a couple of Live-ly ones? Here’s how to get the Windows Live Essentials you. 196 Calculating — Free 1 97 Painting 198 Sticking Sticky Notes 20 0 Using Sneaky Key Commands 20 0 Chapter 5: Troubleshooting and Getting Help 20 5 Troubleshooting in the Action Center 20 6 Tracking Your