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Tom’s Tech Tips

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Windows® 7 – What’s New for Legal Nurse Consultants and How You Can Get Win7 Features Without Upgrading!

Windows® 7 came out last week and the Windows world is buzzing about its cool new features. Some of these features are familiar to Windows Vista® users and are slightly upgraded. Other features are new and will be useful to legal nurse consultants while some are just cool. The new Win7 delivers a lot of highly technical upgrades and security upgrades plus one really cool upgrade – the ability to create “Libraries” which are collections of files of the same type, no matter what directories they’re stored in on your hard drive (it shows all your photos – no matter where stored). Let’s take a quick look at the coolest upgrades I’m excited about and how the average Windows XP® or Windows Vista user can get them without suffering through the upgrade to Win7.

First, give yourself some CLNC® “Snap.” If you’re a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant with a wide-screen monitor, Win7 has a feature called “Snap” which allows you to anchor an open window against the right or left side of the screen either by dragging it or hitting a combination of Windows keys and right or left arrows. The selected window will fill half the screen and leave room to open another window.

Anchor window to left with “Snap”

OldWin (Vista and XP) users can get a beta (meaning use at your own risk, unsupported, third-party program) version of this from AeroSnap. I love this because it eliminates the tedious process of resizing a window by hand (plus it’s neat). It works on my dual screens just as well as wide screens and is really handy on my laptop while I’m traveling. You’ll like it too. Remember to right click on the AeroSnap icon and click in the box next to Start with Windows. That way it’ll always be there for you.

Next, since CLNC® consultants like to shake things up, you can bring this concept to your screen. In Win7 you can grab an active window by the blue bar (with your left mouse button), double click it, then shake it back and forth to make all the other open windows minimize themselves to the taskbar. Repeating the motion will restore all the windows. We all know we can click the little “Show Desktop” button to minimize all our windows, but then we’ve got to fish around and restore the one we want. Aero Shake from lifehacker allows those of us using the OldWin to have Win7 convenience. Way cool.

You can clear up the system tray in the bottom right side of your taskbar by hiding inactive icons. Between my Quick Launch bar, the list of open windows and system tray icons, the taskbar at the bottom of my screen gets pretty cluttered. Win7 allows you to selectively hide your unused system tray icons – OldWin users can do this too. Right click on any clear part of your taskbar. In the first pop-up make sure Hide Inactive Icons is checked, then click Customize to get the Customize Notifications pop-up (in Vista you have to go to the Customize Notifications pop-up to see the “Hide” checkbox).

XP Start Menu Properties Screens

On the Customize Notifications pop-up you can select the behavior for different current icons (Hide when inactive, Always hide or Always show). Pick the behavior you want for each icon then hit OK on each pop-up to save your settings. Your taskbar will appear cleaner and you’ll have more room for active windows.

Finally legal nurse consultants can stop the fishing expeditions (between open window icons) by allowing preview thumbnails of your open windows in your taskbar. This one is for XP users only and emulates the Vista/Win7 rollover Thumbnails or pop-up Previews that allow you to see the contents of your open windows if you mouse over your taskbar icons.

Preview thumbnail

To get it, visit the “How-To Geek” site and look for the “Download Visual Tooltip 2.1” link. Follow that link, fish around a bit and you’ll find the link to download the zip file for Visual Tooltip. Download it, unzip it, double-click on the VisualToolTip.exe file to install it. You’ll find a little icon installed in your system tray that tells you it’s running. Go back to How-To Geek and follow the instructions to resize the previews (and make sure you check the “start with Windows” box).

Those were easy weren’t they? You’ve just previewed some of the cool new features in Win7 and found ways to add these to your current Windows version. Remember that you’re using these at your own risk. They are beta or unsupported products, but they sure are fun.

Win7 will be a darn good version of Windows once the second service pack comes out. Until then, or at least until you choose to upgrade from XP or Vista, any legal nurse consultant can add the cool new features of Win7 to her legal nurse consulting business by emulating some of its best tools and tricks.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

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*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.

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