Whether it's for school or for work, when you're in a hurry, it helps to have a laptop that works as fast as you do. 'Everything is more pressing when you're on the road,' says Brian Woods, president of SHBO Technologies, an IT consultancy in West Palm Beach, Florida. 'When you need something at a client site or trade show, you need it now.' This can add stress to an already hectic schedule. Windows® 7 Professional is designed to help you get things done faster when you're on the road. Here are seven of the ways you can move faster, and reduce stress:
- Faster startup. The program is designed to start quickly, by launching many background services only as needed. 'We've seen significant improvements in the speed with which PCs start, shut down, and resume from sleep state,' says Christopher Rhoda, vice president for Information Services and chief information officer at Thomas College. 'This is probably most appreciated by students, many of whom carry their laptops around all day.'
- Power up. The program can help save power with smart-energy features, such as reducing display brightness after a period of inactivity and automatically detecting and shutting down applications that are not in use. 'I was really very surprised at how long the battery lasts on my laptop now that I'm using Windows 7,' says James Cryan, IT Manager for Reflex Marine, a marine transport company. 'It manages everything a lot better, and I don't need to worry about looking for an outlet to recharge my system as soon as I've arrived at a customer or meeting site. Now my system just runs seamlessly for hours on end.'
- Mobility center. If you press the Windows key and the K key on your keyboard, you'll be taken instantly to the Mobility Center—a control panel you can use to adjust all the laptop elements that matter most to them, like Wi-Fi Connections, battery status, display, and presentation settings.
- Easy touch. Windows 7 supports touch screens, which can be handy in situations where it's not convenient to use a mouse. For example, a salesperson making a client presentation could simply use a touch screen to zoom in on a pertinent slide or scroll quickly to a piece of convincing data.
- Fast projector setup. When you're on someone's calendar, the last thing you want them to do is twiddle their thumbs while you're fiddling with a projector. The driver display utility makes it easy to plug in a projector and display presentations without delay. You can also quickly control the display projection by pressing the Windows-P key combination.
- Faster search. The search feature in Windows 7 gives you a near-instant way to find what you're looking for. Start typing a search term on the start menu, and search will scan the documents, e-mails, and other files on your PC as well as external hard drives and networked PCs. The search results pop up right on the start menu.
- Find printers. With location-aware printing you can designate default printers in different locations, so there is no need to reset the default printer or remember the printer name when you move from one network to another.
