I haven’t even got my own copy of Windows 7 yet. The I.T. department is rolling it out across the company and already my colleagues are complaining about its idiosyncrasies. Phrases like “What the hell is that green bar doing again?", “it keeps doing a different thing each time” and “there so much GUI I can’t actually see *my* stuff". So I have started this article as blogglue to join together all the blogs, articles and links I will discover or write that tell you how to switch off or work around all the new “features” of Windows 7. God help us all - I am more seriously thinking of switching over to MacOS than ever before. Think I might start with a laptop (they are kind of sexy) and after all it is Unix underneath (queue coy smile). A lot of these “features” exist in Windows Vista as well and may work there too. Anyway here’s one I know I will need because it has made its way from Vista which is on one of my home computers :( Remove Favorites, Libraries, and Homegroup from Navigation Pane This is a real pane (get it?). Favorites and Libraries occupy quite a large proportion of the navigation panel in File Explorer. This means that when ever you load it in you always have to scroll down to the place you want. You can rarely get the whole thing in one panel without scrollbars. As soon as the scrollbars appear you need to make the panel wider because the ends of the folders are now hidden behind the scrollbars and the thing keeps shifting from left to right whenever you move around. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproui/thread/ac419c2b-4a38-44f0-b1f0-b0ed9fdcfdeb Where is Quick Launch on Windows 7 http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/add-the-quick-launch-bar-to-the-taskbar-in-windows-7/ Automatically Expand Navigation Pane Tree to Current Folder in Windows 7 I’ve been trying to use the new Windows Explorer style of navigating around the directory structure but it makes it really difficult to compare directories. The biggest pain is that if you cut and paste a directory into the navigation bar at the top then the directory tree structure doesn’t expand out to display where you are in the file system. If you are comparing folders or have folders that are similar then you never know which one you are looking at. You also can’t hop between different folders in a random-access way, you either have to go forwards/backwards or think about where those folders live to expand them. I spent most of my explorer time synchronising the tree view with the file view. http://www.mydigitallife.info/automatically-expand-navigation-pane-tree-to-current-folder-in-windows-7/ How To Toggle the Navigation Pane with a Button in Windows Explorer http://mintywhite.com/windows-7/7customization/toggle-navigation-pane-button-windows-explorer/ Update your SendTo list Start -> Run, enter shell:sendto to open the SendTo folder; then just drag the applications you want into it. http://gigaom.com/mobile/customize-the-windows-7-send-to-menu-option/ Windows removes context menu entries when more than 15 files are selected Strange one this! To stop us doing stupid things when large numbers of files are selected, Windows removes most of the “add-on” entries from the context menu. Nice idea in principle, but if you’re trying to add a load of source files to a source controller then you can’t. http://www.ghacks.net/2011/03/05/fix-context-menu-items-missing-in-windows-explorer/ Folder view is different even, though you have set them to be the same Under Windows XP you would configure a folder just the way you like it and then go to Tools->Folder Options…, select the View tab then click the Apply to Folders button. From that point on your lovely settings would be used across all folders. This is not the same under Windows 7. If you read the Folder views title it says viewS and the blurb says “You can apply the view (such as Details or Icon) that you are using for this folder to all folders of this type“. Windows 7 decides what class of folder it is and lets you create a viewing profile for how to view the contents of that folder. We are not sure how it decides, probably Microsoft Voodoo, or how you can find out what classes of folder you have. The up shot of this, is that if you have a all folders of pictures will show thumbnails and all folders of Word documents to show full details. To make this work you must go to a folder and set it up the way you want and click through to the Apply to Folders button. You’ll have to do this for each of the folder classes individually. Windows Explorer expands folders inappropriately, jumping the folder you expand to the bottom of the navigation pane This is by far and away the most annoying bug I’ve found in Windows 7 so far. If you use the left hand directory tree to navigate your way around the filing system then you will definitely have noticed this bug. As you expand each of the tree branches the branch you have just expanded jumps to the bottom of the screen. So to navigate down a directory you have to expand, scroll the newly expanded directory back to the mouse pointer, expand the next folder down, scroll the newly expanded directory back to the mouse pointer. If you keep the folder at the bottom where it has moved itself you still have to scroll upwards because you can’t see the next folder to expand. Just to show how much Microsoft listens to its customers there are 23 pages of requests to fix this on the Microsoft answers site spanning 2 years, with no official answer. There is also an issue on Microsoft’s Connect site with a hundred people asking for this issue to be addressed. There is however a list of work-a-rounds, one of which is to install ClassicShell which is a SourceForge project that, amongst other things fixes explorer and replaces the crappy new start menu with the old style one. Give it a go! Resources If you can’t find what you are looking for here, then try these pages: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx