This post was originally posted for the Windows 7 Beta, but has been reposted since most of the tips are still valid for the RC.

I have been using Windows 7 RC for some days now, and I must say that it is still growing on me – like on a lot of other people, for instance Mac lovers Pogue of New York Times, Mossberg and CNET’s Reisinger. There are less reliability problems (iTunes is btw behaving better) and in use I all the time find small improvements and changes that I really appreciate. I have been searching the internet for useful tips and tricks for Windows 7, and so far Tim Sneath from Microsoft has the most complete and best list there is.

His bumper list of so-called Windows 7 secrets contain many tips – here are my favorites (the list is edited and shortened by me, for Tims original posting, with some additional tips/secrets see here):

• Windows Management. 
  With Windows 7 you can dock a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge. You can also drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width. Here are the accompanying keyboard shortcuts:
  • • • Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock;
      • Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes;
      • Win+Shift+Up Arrow and Win+Shift+Down Arrow maximizes and restores the vertical size.
      • This side-by-side docking feature is particularly invaluable on widescreen monitors – it makes the old Windows way of shift-clicking on two items in the taskbar and then using the context menu to arrange them feel really painful.
• Display Projection.
  For an easy access to the different options for displaying the desktop on different displays and projectors hit Win+P, and you’ll be rewarded by the following pop-up window:
  
  Use the arrow keys (or keep hitting Win+P) to switch to “clone”, “extend” or “external only” display settings. You can also access the application as displayswitch.exe.Win+X opens the Windows Mobility Center, which allows you to turn on a presentation mode that switches IM clients to do not disturb, disables screensavers and sets a neutral wallpaper.
• Cut Out The Clutter.
  Working on a document in a window and want to get rid of all the extraneous background noise? Simply hit Win+Home to minimize all the non-active background windows, keeping the window you’re using in its current position. When you’re ready, simply press Win+Home again to restore the background windows to their original locations.
• Multi-Monitor Windows Management.
  The earlier tip on window management showed how you can dock windows within a monitor. One refinement of those shortcuts is that you can use Win+Shift+Left Arrow and Win+Shift+Right Arrow to move windows from one monitor to another – keeping them in the same relative location to the monitor’s top-left origin.
• Find more themes/styles on your computer.
  If you’ve tried to change your desktop wallpaper, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a set of wallpapers there that match the locale you selected when you installed Windows. (If you picked US, you’ll see beautiful views of Crater Lake in Oregon, the Arches National Park, a beach in Hawai’i, etc.) In fact, there are several sets of themed wallpapers installed based on the language you choose, but the others are in a hidden directory. If you’re feeling in an international mood, simply browse to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and you’ll see a series of pictures under the Wallpaper directory for each country. Just double-click on the theme file in the Theme directory to display a rotation through all the pictures for that country. (Note that some countries contain a generic set of placeholder art for now.) I have posted a separate post explaining this one in more detail. You can find it here!
• Problem Steps Recorder. 
  The Problem Steps Recorder provides a simple screen capture tool that enables you to record a series of actions. Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps. It’s a really neat little tool and I can’t wait for it to become ubiquitous on every desktop! The program is called psr.exe; you can also search for it from Control Panel under “Record steps to reproduce a problem”.
• Which add-on in IE8 is slowing it down?
  If you feel like Internet Explorer is taking a long time to load your page, it’s worth taking a look at the add-ons you have installed. One of the more helpful little additions in Internet Explorer 8 is instrumentation for add-on initialization, allowing you to quickly see whether you’re sitting around waiting for plug-ins to load. Just click Tools / Manage Add-ons, and then scroll right in the list view to see the load time. On my machine, I noticed that the Research add-on that Office 2007 installs was a particular culprit, and since I never use it, it was simple to disable it from the same dialog box.
• Rearranging the the Taskbar icons. 
  Tthe icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place and can be reordered to suit your needs, whether they’re pinned shortcuts or running applications. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 etc.You can also drag the system tray icons around to rearrange their order, or move them in and out of the hidden icon list.
• Installing from a USB Memory Stick.
  If you want to install Windows 7 on a computer that does not have an optical drive you can use a USB memory stick instead. Reformat the memory stick as a FAT32 drive, and copy the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO image to the memory stick using xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: is the DVD drive and f: is the removable drive location).
• Windows Vista-Style Taskbar.
  If you for some reason want the new taskbar to resemble the way
  the taskbar in Vista operates you right-click on the taskbar and choose the properties dialog.
  Once there you select the “small icons” checkbox and under the “taskbar buttons” setting, choose “combine when taskbar is full”.
• Keyboard Shortcut for Aero Peak.
  Instead of using the mouse and  the Aero Peak button in the lower right corner you can simply press Win+Space.
  
• Running with Elevated Rights.
  Want to quickly launch a taskbar-docked application as an administrator? It’s easy – hold down Ctrl+Shift while you click on the icon, and you’ll immediately launch it with full administrative rights (assuming your account has the necessary permissions, of course!)
• How to open more instances of one application. 
  If you’ve already got an application open on your desktop (for example, a command prompt window), and you want to open a second instance of the same application, you don’t have to go back to the start menu. You can simply hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon, and it will open a new instance of the application rather than switching to the existing application. For a keyboard-free shortcut, you can middle-click with the third mouse button to do the same thing. (This trick assumes that your application supports multiple running instances, naturally.)
• Switching between several windows of the same application. 
  If you’ve got five Outlook message windows open along with ten other windows, you can quickly tab through just the Outlook windows by holding down the Ctrl key while you repeatedly click on the single Outlook icon. This will toggle through each of the five Outlook windows in order, and is way faster than opening Alt+Tab and trying to figure out which of the tiny thumbnail images relates to the specific message you’re trying to find.
• Walking Through the Taskbar.
  Press Win+T to move the focus to the taskbar. Once you’re there, you can use the arrow keys to select a particular window or group and then hit Enter to launch or activate it. As ever, you can cancel out of this mode by hitting the Esc key.
• The Widescreen Tip.
  Almost every display sold these days is widescreen, whether you’re buying a notebook computer or a monitor. While it might be great for watching DVDs, when you’re trying to get work done it can sometimes feel like you’re a little squeezed for vertical space.The solution: Dock the  taskbar to the left hand side of the screen. The Windows 7 taskbar feels almost as if it was designed with vertical mode as the default – the icons work well on the side of the screen, shortcuts like the Win+T trick mentioned previously automatically switch from left/right arrows to up/down arrows, and so on. The net effect is that you wind up with a much better proportioned working space.
• Pin Your Favorite Folders.
  If you’re always working in the same four or five folders, you can quickly pin them with the Explorer icon on the taskbar. Hold the right-click button down and drag the folder to the taskbar, and it will be automatically pinned in the Explorer Jump List.
• Starting Explorer from “My Computer”.
  If you spend more time manipulating files outside of the documents folders than inside, you might want to change the default starting directory for Windows Explorer so that it opens at the Computer node:
  
  To do this, navigate to Windows Explorer in the Start Menu (it’s in the Accessories folder). Then edit the properties and change the target to read:
  %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /root,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
  
  If you want the change to affect the icon on the taskbar, you’ll need to unpin and repin it to the taskbar so that the new shortcut takes affect. It’s worth noting that Win+E will continue to display the documents library as the default view.
• ISO Burning.
  Ever wanted to burn ISO images? Without the need for third party utilities you can do it directly in Windows 7: Double-click on any DVD or CD .ISO image and you’ll see a helpful little applet that will enable you to burn the image to a blank disc.
• Hiding the Windows Live Messenger Icon.
  In Windows 7 the Windows Live Messenger icon is now very visible in the taskbar (see image below). If you prefer it the way it was before; hidden in the system tray there is a solution for this as well;
  Close Windows Live Messenger, edit the shortcut properties and set the application to run in Windows Vista compatibility mode.

  UPDATE!: As Kevin points out in the comments below this tip unfortunately does not work any more. If you are running the original beta or any interim builds it does work, but not in the RC version.

• System Repair Utility
  Windows 7 now includes the ability to create a system repair disc, which is essentially a CD-bootable version of Windows that just includes the command prompt and a suite of system tools. Just type “system repair disc” in the Start Menu search box, and you’ll be led to the utility.

Sources;

Tim Sneath;

OK, so I am a little late in posting this piece of news, but anyway. As of today Windows 7 RC and Windows XP mode is available to the public.

Microsoft states on its Windows 7 site that the RC will be available at least through July and that it will expire on 1 June 2010. Just a little heads up though; From 1 March 2010 the RC will begin shutting down every 2 hours!

If you want the bits you can go to Microsofts Windows 7 download site

On its Windows 7 site Microsoft provides guides on how to get the ISO files, how to mount them on DVDs and how to install the OS. I have written a lenghty guide on how to install the RC as well.

One of the improvements in Windows 7 is the multiple choices and new way of organizing the Personalize section of the Control Panel. Among the new things is out of the box support for themes. A theme is a set of desktop backgrounds, window color, sounds and screen savers. There are several themes included with Windows 7 as you can see from the screenshot below.

Since I chose to install the English language version of Windows 7, but with Norway and Norwegian as my choices for location and keyboard layout those are the options available to me in the RC. After having roamed around the net, I knew there to be additional localized themes somewhere in the OS. Enabling these are quite easy, and I will lay out the procedure here in 5 easy steps:

Step 1: Folder Options

Open up the Start menu and start to type Folder Options in the search pane. The Folder Options should be the first result, now hit enter to open it up.

Choose the View tab and select to Show hidden files, folders and drives. Then unselect Hide protected operating system files (Recommended). Click Apply

Step 2: Open up Explorer

Open up Explorer and browse to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT . In this hidden protected system folder you will find this;

Step 3: Select the Themes you want.

Each one of those folders; AU, CA, GB and ZA contains localized information as well as themes for those countries. Navigate your way into each one, open the Themes folder and doubleclick on the Windows Theme File. That theme is now activated, and will be available for you under Your Themes in the Personalize section of the Control Panel.

Step 4: Open Folder Options and redo your choices there.

Go back to the Folder Options and make sure you now select Don’t show hidden files, folders and drives, and that you select Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) and then click Apply

Step 5: Open up Personalize and Choose Your Theme

Right click anywhere on the desktop and choose Personalize from the right-click-menu that appears. If you double-clicked and all available localized themes in the MCT folder in step 3 your Personalize section should look something like this now;

Voila!