Why you should upgrade to Windows 7

Library service
Back in the days of Windows 95, managing documents was a relatively simple task. Most files were small documents and, with hard disks being expensive and having little storage, they would normally be stored in the same place. Since Windows XP was released, however, times have changed.

Hard disks are inexpensive and have lots of storage, and with external storage devices available we often store files in many places – on external disks, network storage devices or even other computers.

Also, many users now keep many types of multimedia file on their PCs, including photos, videos, music and more. This means that, with an XP or Vista computer, finding the file you want can be a pain.

Windows 7 introduces a new way to keep track of files wherever they are stored. Its new Libraries are a way to show a collection of similar files in one window, even if they are stored in several folders or on several disks.

Libraries can be easily sorted too, so even if a photo collection is split across dozens of folders you can order the whole lot neatly by month. Libraries are set up for documents, music photos and videos as standard, and you can easily customise these or add more – you might want a library for work files, for example.

Jump List
The right mouse button has long been used in Windows to open important menus full of handy options. With Windows 7, Microsoft has allowed software makers to use it in a new way: right-click a program running in the Taskbar and, if it has been designed for Windows 7, a new Jump List will appear.

This pop-up menu is designed to hold options that will be needed often, so right-clicking Internet Explorer, for example, gives you options for opening a new tab, starting a private browsing session or opening recently used websites.

It’s a handy tool that should become more and more useful as developers adapt their programs to take advantage of Windows 7.

Homegroup for sharing files
When Windows XP appeared computer networks were, for the most part, found in offices. Since then, however, broadband internet connections have become common and the falling price of computers means many people are lucky enough to have more than one PC at home. These factors have transformed home networks from a toy for geeks to a handy tool.

Windows Vista introduced lots of new options for sharing files on home networks, but the result was a mess. In fact, simply getting two computers to share files could be a baffling process as a result of all the different security settings on offer. Windows 7 comes ready with a clever solution: Homegroups.

A Homegroup is, as the name suggests, a group of computers set up, in one home, to share information. The key to the system is its simplicity: create a Homegroup on one computer and it will show you a short password. All other computer users have to do to join the Homegroup is type in this password – no other settings are required.

There are a few hitches with this system, however. First, as we noted in our review, there is no easy way to add Windows XP or Vista computers to a Homegroup, so this option is only useful if you have several Windows 7 computers. Also, netbooks running Windows 7 Starter edition can join a Homegroup but not create one.

Security tool
Windows Vista introduced a new tool called User Account Control (UAC) that was supposed to provide an extra level of security, preventing programs from changing important settings without your permission.

Unfortunately, UAC also had a nasty habit of asking computer users to confirm decisions they had just made and for users who liked to regularly add software, this quickly became such an annoyance that many people disabled it.

UAC is still included in Windows 7, but this time it works the way it was intended. There are now four levels of security on offer, from none at all to the kind of monitoring used in Vista, and the default setting does not ask the user to confirm any choices they have made.