Applications in Windows 7



Windows 7 Ultimate contains more than a dozen applications to allow you to do everything from looking at pictures to authoring essays, and more. You can launch most of the applications right through the Start Menu. Just click the Start button and hover the cursor over All Programs to see most of the applications listed. Click Accessories to view the rest. Launch any of them by clicking the application’s name itself.

Windows Calendar

Windows Calendar is a powerful creation that allows you to schedule appointments, meetings, and whatever you want, as well as to set up pop-up reminders. Reminders can occur any time before the scheduled event that you want.

Windows Calendar is also a task manager; you can add to it stuff that you just need to get done. You can schedule Tasks and assign them reminders, but only if you want to.

Windows Contacts

Windows Contacts isn’t so much like a program that creates a file full of contact information. The contact manager, which permits you to save all sorts of data on everyone you know, functions more like a Windows Explorer folder with special buttons on the toolbar. It creates multiple files—one for each contact.

Internet Explorer 7+

IE7+ is Microsoft’s totally restored Web browser, and it is armed with far better features and security than any of its predecessors.

Windows DVD Maker

While Windows XP boasted the ability to burn CDs, it couldn’t handle DVD creation; users were forced to employ a third-party application like Nero. Windows 7 contains Windows DVD Maker, which lets you to create video and photo DVDs that can play on any machine, including DVD players, as long as it supports DVD-R or DVD-RW discs. Launch Windows DVD Maker through the Start Menu.

Windows Photo Gallery

Viewing photos—and videos—is part of Windows 7’s multimedia experience, and with Windows Photo Gallery you can do it in a countless of ways. When you first fire up the application, it looks around the hard drive for image files. It then instantly organizes them into a sheet of thumbnails that you can sort in a number of ways.

Notepad and WordPad

These text editors allow you to obtain through basic word processing without a copy of Office. Although they lack truly powerful features like spell checkers and auto-formatting, they are both useful in their own ways.

Notepad, being a basic and, more important, a featureless text editor, is the program of choice for many a scripter and programmer. You can type anything you like into Notepad and save it as the most basic of text files, without formatting of any sort.

WordPad supports formatting and permits you to work with formatted text and plain text. It can save formatted text in rich text format (RTF). Although it is no substitute for Microsoft Word, it does allow you to do some basic word processing and even view Word document files without a more expensive application.

Paint

Many years ago, this extremely simple image program was called Paintbrush. Nowadays, it is a much more accomplished program, but Paint is not going to win the hearts and minds of people who are used to Adobe Photoshop. Paint features simple drawing tools like line and curve creators, brushes, fills, spray paint tools, and a full palette of colors. It doesn’t permit you to work in layers or anything fancy like that, but it is okay for making very simple works of art.

Sound Recorder

This simple application allows you to record audio through a microphone attached to your primary audio device (e.g., your computer’s sound card). When you launch Sound Recorder, its tiny interface will pops up.

Snipping tool

This tool is brand new in Windows 7. The Snipping tool allows you to take part or the entire desktop and turn it into an image, which you can then save. The Snipping tool allows you to send the snip as an e-mail; draw on it with pen and highlighter tools; save the snip as a JPEG, GIF, PNG, HTML, or other file; and copy the snip to the clipboard.

Utilities

The Windows 7 utilities, such as Backup, Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter, System Restore, and others. These utilities will assist you to maintain the operating system and your files; to keep your stuff safe, secure, and out of trouble; and to keep everything working well.