Windows® 7 Secrets®

Chapter 4. What's New in the Windows 7 User Experience

In This Chapter

• Exploring the various Windows 7 user experiences

• Understanding what you need to run Windows Aero

• Personalizing the Windows 7 desktop

• Examining the Windows 7 shell with Explorer

• Touching Your Computer with Windows Touch

Gazing upon Windows 7 for the first time, either you will feel a sense of déjà vu or you will immediately be struck by how different everything looks, depending on whether you're coming from Windows XP or Vista. For XP users, the translucent and glasslike windows and the subtle animations and visual cues will all be new. For Vista users, the interface has been refined, enhanced, and sped up. Regardless of your background, this new interface leaves no doubt: Windows 7 is a major new Windows version, with much to learn and explore. In this chapter, we'll examine what's changed in the Windows 7 user interface since Windows XP and Vista, and explain what you need to know to adapt to this new system.

Understanding the Windows 7 User Experience

When the first PCs hit the streets over 20 years ago, users were saddled with an unfriendly, non-intuitive user interface based on the MS-DOS command line and its ubiquitous C:\ prompt. Since then, computer user interfaces have come a long way, first with the advent of the mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI) on the Macintosh and later in Windows, and then with the proliferation of Internet connectivity in the late 1990s, which blurred the line between local and ...