Discover 6 top-notch hidden Windows 7 functionalities

• Reliability Monitor:  This tool helps understand the reasons for a poor system performance. It creates a graph showing the reliability score of your system over a certain number of weeks (rated on a scale of 1 to 10). The graph highlights also what programs, Windows components or other items have crashed and when. To activate it, open Start/Search, look for reliability and run Reliability History (fig.1).

Fig. 1 (Click to enlarge)

•   Problem Steps Recorder: If you need outside help to solve a computer problem, this tool comes in very handy because allows you to automatically capture the steps you take on a computer, including a text description of where you clicked (text annotations) and a screenshot of each click. To access the tool, you have to open Start/Search, look for psr and click Start Record (Fig. 2). The recorded file will be saved as a zip file, that can be emailed out for help .

Fig. 2 (Click to enlarge)

•   Pin Folders to the Taskbar: As I've explained in a previous post,  in Windows 7 you can pin applications only to the taskbar, as a general rule, but there's a workaround which allows to pin folders, as well. If you right-click a folder and drag it to an empty area on the taskbar or to the Windows Explorer button, you can pin it to Windows Explorer (Fig. 3). This way you can access the folder by right-clicking the Windows Explorer button.

Fig. 3 (Click to enlarge)

•   WordPad extended functionalities: In Windows 7, unlike previous versions, WordPad can read .ODT (Open Document Test) files, created with OpenOffice Writer, and .docx files created with Microsoft Word 2007/2010. system (Fig. 4). WordPad may have a problem with a specific text formatting and it doesn't support Word 2003 documents, though.

Fig. 4 (Click to enlarge)

•  Enhanced Calculator: Windows 7 calculator has some useful extra functionalities, listed under the View menu (Fig. 5). It can deal with unit conversion (temperature, weight, area and others) and date calculations and there are worksheets to calculate a mortgage payment or a car's fuel mileage. It keeps track of your previous calculations until the program is open.

Fig. 5

•   Delete a file for good with CIPHER: It's well-known (at least to IT professionals) that, when you delete files and folders in a Windows-based operating system, they don't get actually erased. They get only inaccessible to Windows Explorer and the clusters they occupied are marked as usable, which means they still lie on the hard drive, and can be recovered with specific software, until they get overwritten with new data. Not everybody knows, though, that Windows has a utility called CIPHER which allows you to delete a file for good by overwriting all the free space on a hard drive. It is available from Command Prompt (accessible from Start/All Programs/Accessories or from Start/Search/CMD) by entering the command cipher /w:X (X should be replaced by the letter of the drive or partition you want to wipe). The larger the free hard drive space, the longer this process will be (Fig. 6). 

Fig. 6 (Click to enlarge)