Windows 7-Tips&Tricks Series: Shake Your Desktop Free Of Clutter & Power Efficiency Report

This Is Our 2nd Trick/Tip of the Windows 7 Series. If you like these and want us to continue the Windows 7 Series  comment  and tell us what you think.

Shake Your Desktop Free of Clutter:

If you run multiple programs simultaneously, your desktop can get extremely cluttered. This can get annoying if you are working on one program and want to minimize all other open windows – In previous version of Windows, you have to minimize them individually thus taking your precious time, but Windows 7 have a built in feature – called Aero Shake, you can minimize all other open windows except the one in focus – that too all in a single step. Click and hold the title bar of the window you want to keep on the desktop and while still holding that window, shake it quickly back and forth until all other windows minimize to the taskbar. To make them return, shake the title bar again.

Tip: You can also perform the above step by holding the Windows key + Home key combination but that would not include much fun.

Get a Power Efficiency Report:

This is a must if you are using your laptop and you are puzzled that why your laptop’s battery drains so fast.

Windows 7 includes a built in hidden tool that will examine your laptop’s energy use and then make recommendations on how to improve it. To use it follw these steps:

1. Run the command Prompt as an Administrator. To do this , press Start button and type cmd and when the cmd icon  appears, just right click on it and choose “Run as Administrator” as shown below:

2. Provide the confirmation and then in the command prompt type  powercfg –energy –output \Energy\energy_report.html

Note: Here there is a space between powercfg and –energy and similar space exists between –energy and output and also with –output and \Energy\energy_report.html. Here ‘Energy’ is the name of the folder which is present at C: drive and Energy_report.html is the name of the file that would be generated after windows check the power settings.

Make sure that you don’t type the complete path, like if you are making a folder ‘ABC’ at root of C: drive, then make sure to mention the name of the output folder as \ABC and not as C:\ABC, otherwise Windows would interpret the output folder as C:\C:\ABC and not C:\ABC. For further reference see the figure:

(View full-size image)

After the efficiency report is generated, the Command Prompt will notify you to see the energy report at the pre-set location. From this energy report, you can follow the recommendations for ways to improve the power performance of your computer.

Tagged as: Clutter Free, Tips and Tricks Series, windows 7