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I am working with keyboard shortcuts a lot since they save a great amount of time especially when you do repetitive tasks or you are dealing with many windows. Yesterday I switched my computer to Windows 7 beta. I have already played around some time with it by installing it on a virtual machine and they worked great. While I have never used a beta operating system for my main computer, this time I decided to do it since I saw that I could be working faster with Windows 7 than I used to work with Vista. So here are some of the keyboard shortcuts I am using to make working easier and more productive:

Using Win key + arrows you can control the window you are working on. Win + Left makes the window occupy the left half of the screen and Win + right the right part. Especially good if you want to have windows side by side. With Win + Up you can maximize the window and Win + down minimizes it.

An issue that could be really frustrating in some computers is switching between screens. Now you can just hit Win + P and a panel will appear with all the possible cases. Also if you are a multi monitor fan then you can now send windows to other monitors by hitting Win + Shift + Left or Win + Shift + Right depending on which monitor you want your window to go.

Hitting Win + Home will minimize all your Windows except for the one you are working on. This shortcut is useful especially when you are trying to focus on a window and you have many other applications running in the background. However I usually work on maximized windows so I don’t use this shortcut frequently.

The best tip for launching apps from the new taskbar is that you can hit Win + the number of the application you want to launch. I used to have keyboard shortcuts for each application on Windows Vista but now I have docked all the applications I need so it’s very easy to launch them using this shortcut.

Should you need to see what’s happening on your desktop, just hold down Win + Space. Also if you have mupltiple windows of the same applications which are grouped at the new taskbar you can hold down Control key and start hitting the icon of the application at the taskbar. This will start displaying the windows one by one just like Alt + TAB does but only for that specific application.

The fastest way to the taskbar is the shortcut key Win + T which moves focus to the taskbar. Then you can navigate with the arrow keys to open / select programs.

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