Windows 7: Articles

Q: Is Microsoft working on an operating system after Windows Vista?

Windows 7 ships with a host of great features and applications. It also carries a lot of dead weight inherited from its predecessors. The following three applications have received little or no attention from Microsoft as the years have progressed – and their fate is none improved in Windows 7.

What’s more, there are free alternatives to each app that put their Windows equivalents to shame.

Ditch Paint for Paint.NET

After many, many years, Microsoft finally updated their native MS Paint application. The good news? It looks better. The bad news? It’s still as feature-poor as it was in Windows Vista.

There’s no reason to bother with this application when the free Paint.NET gives you everything that Paint has – and more. Paint.NET not only offers a great interface, but a great set of features.

Paint.NET supports all the basic features you’d want from a photo and graphics editor, such as crop, resize, flip,and rotate. It supports a basic array of tools (paint, pencil, eraser, shapes), and a layering system for building a single image out of several layered photos and drawings.

There are 32 basic effects filters available, including the Photo effects Red-Eye Removal and Soften Portrait.If the built-in effects don’t supply what you need, you can download any number of effects plugins designed to work inside Paint.NET.

Built using Microsoft’s ClickOnce application update technology, Paint.NET detects when a new version is available, and asks if you want it installed. Once you download this application, it’ll keep itself up to date.

Ditch Notepad for Notepad++
Sometimes, you don’t need the power of Microsoft Word or an online document system like Google Docs; a plain old text file will do. Microsoft’s Notepad, however, takes “plain” to ridiculous extremes.

The tiny app supports word wrap, a basic find/replace, and…well, that’s about it. Enter Notepad++, a free “programmer’s text editor” by Don Ho. Notepad++ has a multiple document interface, so you can have several text files open in the same app (what a concept!).

If you write text files in HTML, XML, or any other programming language, Notepad++ uses syntax highlighting to identify programmatic objects such as element names and attributes, making your files easier to read.

Notepad++ can be placed in “Post-It” mode, so that it resembles a tabbed version of Windows’ Sticky Notes. If you’re working with large text files, you can jump quickly around the document with user-defined bookmarks.

The best feature of Notepad++ for ordinary mortals is its Find/Replace, which is closer to Word’s Find feature than Notepad’s. You can find and replace using ordinary characters, special characters, or regular expressions. Notepad++ supports replacing text not only in the current file, but in all open files.

If you work frequently with plain text files, you need this application in your Start menu.

Ditch Sound Recorder for Audacity
Poor, poor Sound Recorder. The Microsoft utility for capturing voice recordings is a bare window with three basic functions: Start Recording, Stop Recording, and Help.

If you want to record audio for a blog podcast, you’ll need something a little more powerful than this.

Enter Audacity, an open-source audio editor that not only supports recording your voice, but editing down the results, applying effects such as Fade, Echo, and Noise Removal. You can record your own sound, or editing existing sound files.

The latest beta version offers “provisional” support for Windows 7, but seems to work as well as its predecessor does on Vista.

Audacity saves all recordings and sound edits in its native file format. You can export to a range of audio formats, including WAV and M4A (AAC).

You can open and edit MP3 files natively; saving to MP3 format requires downloading the (free) LAME MP3 Encoder.