15 Incredible Windows Tips and Tricks | Must Know

TRICK 1: Create ‘On-the-Go’ Access to Movies Using Dropbox and Handbreak

The Scenario: You just finished ripping your DVD collection to your PC, haven’t had time to convert them to the iPhone format, and are on a time-crunch. You want to take your movies with you, but you can’t be late for work (or some other boring event you wish to be anti-social at).

The answer: Combine Handbrake and Dropbox. In Handbrake, add all the files you want to convert into the conversion queue with the format set to ‘iPhone’ and the destination

Windows 7 general tips

Just got your hands on Windows 7 and want to bend it to your will? No problem. We've got plenty of tips, hacks and secrets to keep you busy for a long time, including automatically opening Windows Explorer to a folder of your choice, speeding up taskbar thumbnails, finding hidden desktop themes, forcing User Account Control to act the way you'd like, keeping your Explorer searches secret from others, and more.

So check out these tips. If you like them, we'll keep more coming.

General tips

We'll start with a few nifty tips that can make your desktop more interesting, make it easier to get around and increase your computer's power efficiency.

TIP 1: Shake Your Desktop Free of Clutter

If you frequently run multiple programs simultaneously, your desktop can get extremely cluttered. This can get annoying if you're working on one program and want to minimize all the other windows -- in previous versions of Windows you had to minimize them individually.

With Windows 7's "shake" feature, though, you can minimize every window except the one in which you're currently working -- in a single step. Click and hold the title bar of the window you want to keep on the desktop; while still holding the title bar, shake it quickly back and forth until all of the other windows minimize to the taskbar. Then let go. To make them return, shake the title bar again.

You can accomplish the same thing by pressing the Window key-Home key combination -- although doing that is not nearly as much fun.

TIP 2: Get a Power Efficiency Report

Have a laptop and want to get more battery life out of it? Windows 7 includes a hidden built-in tool that will examine your laptop's energy use and make recommendations on how to improve it. To use it: