External/Internal Hard Drive

[Maguspk]

Ended up going with an internal drive, got a 1 TB Western Digital, installation went great and then my system gave long beeps and wouldn't boot, bad memory ftw. Turns out a stick of memory decided to retire while I was inside installating the HD, oh well, down to 3 GB of memory now.

Besides that, I was able to install Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate on my old HD (500GB) on it's own partition (50 GB) and just kept my music and such on the 1 TB drive. I am really impressed with Windows 7 atm, managed to install everything I had without any issues and my PC is running perfectly with it.

[fishstix]

I started looking around at new features and found a few neat tricks.

Aero shake: if drag a window with your mouse and shake it, it'll minimize every other window, shake it a 2nd time and it'll restore them. I'm not sure how hard you have to shake the window to have it activate, but it's fun to mess around with >.>

Aero snap: if you drag a window to the top of the screen, it'll maximize, drag it to the left or right and it'll resize it from the top of the screen to the bottom, covering the left or right half.

windows key + p = shortcut to configure your multi-display options. You can set it to computer screen only, duplicate, extend, or projector only. the function is meant for a laptop + projector, but guess it can be used for a pc also.

from wiki:
* Win+Space operates as a keyboard shortcut for Aero Peek.
* Win+Up and Win+Down are new shortcuts for Maximize and Restore/Minimize.
* Win+Shift+Up vertically maximises the current window
* Win+Left and Win+Right snap the current window to the left or right half of the current display; successive keypresses will move the window to other monitors in a multi-monitor configuration.
* Win+Shift+Left and Win+Shift+Right move the current window to the left or right display.
* Win+ + and Win+ − (minus sign) zoom the desktop in and out.
* Win+Home operates as a keyboard shortcut for Aero Shake.
* Win+P shows an "external display options" selector that gives the user the choice of showing the desktop on only the computer's screen, only the external display, on both at the same time (mirroring), or on both displays with independent desktops (extending).

Taskbar:

* Shift + Click, or Middle click starts a new instance of the application, regardless of whether it's already running.
* Ctrl + Shift + Click starts a new instance with Administrator privileges; by default, a User Account Control prompt will be displayed.
* Shift + Right-click shows the classic Window menu (Restore / Minimize / Move / etc); right-clicking on the application's thumbnail image will also show this menu. If the icon being clicked on is a grouped icon, the classic menu with Restore All / Minimize All / Close All menu is shown.
* Ctrl + Click on a grouped icon cycles between the windows (or tabs) in the group.

and then also, you can enable multi-core support to the windows bootup process (idk if it really helps decrease the boot time)

[mootsfox]

Winkey + left = snap to the left
Winkey + up = fill screen
Winkey + right = snap to the right

I have those macro'd on my G15 keyboard, makes moving windows awesomely easy.