4 Amazing Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows 7

1. Minimize Multiple Inactive Background Window in a Single Click

Suppose you are working on an important document but the other inactive but open windows are sneaking in from behind. It may be very distracting however silly may you find. So, what do you? Do you minimize all with Windows+D and then resurface the current one? No. There is a shorter way in Windows 7.



Simply hit Win+Home to minimize all the non-active background windows, keeping the window you’re using in its current position. When you’re ready, press Win+Home again to restore the background windows to their original locations.

2. Use Hot Keys for Applications

Did you know that you can rearrange the icons in the taskbar of Windows 7. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 etc I press Win + 5 and there comes my GOM player! Very cool.

3. Launch Administrative Privilege for any Application through Shortcuts

Suppose you are working on some program and suddenly you see that you don't have administrative privileges to do that particular operation. What do you do then? Switch account? No.

Just press CTRL+Shift and then click the icon you want to have admin privilege of. It will come up with full administrative privilege assuming you have the permission or the security rights.

4. Specialized Window Switching

Tim Sneath from blogs.msdn has a very detailed look at this. Lemme quote his findings here.

Another feature that power users will love is the ability to do a kind of Alt+Tab switching across windows that belong to just one application. For example, if you’ve got five Outlook message windows open along with ten other windows, you can quickly tab through just the Outlook windows by holding down the Ctrl key while you repeatedly click on the single Outlook icon. This will toggle through each of the five Outlook windows in order, and is way faster than opening Alt+Tab and trying to figure out which of the tiny thumbnail images relates to the specific message you’re trying to find.