Windows 7 penetrated the consciousness of the market by the end of 2009, with a strong majority of US consumers aware of the product. Forrester also noticed that the operating system started to break a well-known trend: historically most consumers acquire new operating systems when they purchase their new PC. With Windows 7, however, upgrade behavior was much stronger…”

ARS Technica – Early adopters very satisfied with Windows 7

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.”

Gizmodo – Understanding Windows 7’s ‘GodMode’

Download Change Hover time Registry Key here

By default, the registry key file is set to decrease the delay to 30ms. If you want to change this, you can right click the registry key, and click on Edit. In Notepad, you can change the number 30 to anything between 0 and 4000. I don’t recommend choosing 0 for the delay. Once you’re done, save the file and double-click it to add the key to the registry. Changes don’t take effect until you restart your computer.

Manual Method:

You can also edit the registry key manually yourself.

1) Open the Start menu and type regedit in the search bar

2) Proceed to the following directory: HKEY_Current_USER\Control Panel\Mouse

3) Right click the MouseHoverTime key and choose Modify

4) Change it to a value between 0 and 4000. The number you input will be the millisecond delay before thumbnail previews activate when you hover your mouse over an application.I don’t recommend selecting a value of 0 for this option.

Changes don’t take place until you restart your computer.

Now before we begin if you want to use this feature you will need have Windows 7 Ultimate (or Enterprise) edition installed.

How do I encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert your USB device you want to encrypt into your computer.

Step 2. Right click on the USB device in Windows Explorer and click on the “Turn on BitLocker…”

Step 3. Tick the “Use a password to unlock the drive” and then type the same password in the two password field’s and then click “Next”.

Note: As it says, you should try an make this password as complicated as possible with a combination of lower and upper case letter, numbers, spaces, and/or symbols.

Step 4. You are now FORCED to either save a file or print the recovery key for the device. This ensures that you have a copy of the 48 digit recovery in case you ever forget the password.

Note: You cannot save the recovery key to the device that you want to encrypt as this would be obviously be useless if you were to ever forget the unlock key.

Step 5. Once you have saved or printed the recovery key you will be able to continue by pressing “Next”.

Step 6. You are ready to encrypt the drive and all you have to do is click “Start Encrypting”.

Warning: This can take a LONG time especialy if you are encrypting a very large drive via a USB connection (My Western Digital 1tb USB external hard drive this process took about 12 hours).

First thing the encryption process does is install the BitLocker to Go reader application that will let you read the the device on down-level OS’s such as Windows XP and Vista.

Now the drive will start to encrypt.

Note: You can pause this encryption of this device and remove if it is taking longer than you thought but from this point you will need to enter the encryption key to access the data on the drive even though it is not fully encrypted. The other thing to note is that the drive will be read only until the encryption process has been completed.

Once completed click “Close” and the drive is now encrypted and ready to use.

The way to tell if a drive is encrypted in Windows Explorer is by the padlock symbol you can see on the drive icon (see belwo against “Nano (E:)”). An open grey padlock represents an unlocked drive and and closed gold padlock represents a locked drive.

How do I unlock and encrypt a USB device?

Step 1. Insert the USB device into a Windows 7 computer and you should be automatically prompted for a password to decrypt the device. Then just type the password in the password field and tick “Unlock”.

Note: If you tick the “Automatically unlock on this computer from now on” then the unlock password for this device will be stored on the registry of the computer so be very sure you trust this computer before using this option.

Step 2. Your DONE! the drive will now behave exactly as per normal.

Alternatively if the device is already connected and you need to unlock it, just right click on the drive in Windows Explorer and click the “Unlock Drive…” option. You will then be prompted with the same unlock drive dialogue box as seen above.

By Alan Burchill

Twitter at @alanburchill

Blog http://abskb.spaces.live.com

”The indexing service that powers Windows search can now perform OCR of TIFF images. Though not enabled by default (due to resource usage constraints), installing it gives full-text searching of TIFFs. Scanned documents and faxes are the main target for this capability.”

See the Microsoft TechNet page for installation info.

ARS Technica – Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows 7 (p.14 of 15)

If you’re jumping into Windows 7 for the first time this Thursday, or soon after, you won’t find yourself facing an entirely new-looking, strange-acting Windows. Most of Windows 7’s features are refinements, tweaks, and speed-ups from Vista. Your Lifehacker editors have been using 7 ever since the Windows 7 Beta dropped in January, and we’ve found a few things worth noting and, in some cases, crowing about, like these 10 things to look forward to in Windows 7, or Windows 7’s underhyped features.

Considering that we know that 86% of you are upgrading to Windows 7, we thought it might be worth a little guidance for getting to ready to do just that.

Lifehacker: Prep Your PC for Windows 7