Microsoft stripped its calendar and photo gallery apps from Windows 7, but one extra it did bundle into the Windows 7 Preview is PowerShell, a souped-up command line and scripting GUI that frees you, finally, from the limits of DOS batch scripts. PowerShell is available as a free download for XP and Vista users, too.

If you're interested in learning PowerShell, then you can download the PowerShell documentation here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/7/1/47104ec6-410d-4492-890b-2a3... (ZIP file).

UPDATE: If you want examples of scripts, please go to here: http://www.scriptinganswers.com/forum2/default.asp?C=8

Not only does Windows 7's upgraded Aero interface power up your taskbar, but it includes new gestures for managing your workspace — like shaking a single window to clear away background windows. Check it out in the screencast above. When you want to focus on the task at hand on a desktop cluttered with windows, just grab the window bar of the app you want to work in and shake it back and forth to clear away the rest. Another shake will restore the background apps to their former state. You can also drag and drop a window to the edge of the screen to maximize it, and click on its top bar again to restore its previous size. Hit the play button above to see the shake-shake-shake and the drag and drop maximization in action. Unless you're a big fan of mouse gestures, you probably won't use this new feature a whole lot—unless, of course, you wind up running Windows 7 on a touchscreen device.

With your BitTorrent addiction in full swing, you've filled hard drives with media but can't seem to figure out how to burn any of the videos you downloaded to a DVD. Sound familiar? It's a common problem, and there was a time that it didn't have many simple (or free) solutions. Luckily that's no longer the case, and today we're taking a look at two dead simple solutions for burning virtually any video to a DVD you can pop into your DVD player and enjoy.

Find the whole article here: http://lifehacker.com/5082262/how-to-burn-any-video-file-to-a-playable-v...

Sate your afternoon sugar cravings with a dead-easy chocolate cake recipe that only requires hot chocolate mix, flour, an egg, cooking spray, and oil (all stuff you've got in your pantry anyway). Grab the biggest microwavable coffee mug you've got in your cupboard, and cover the inside with cooking spray. Mix up four tablespoons of flour and nine tablespoons of hot chocolate mix, then throw in three tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and one egg. Once it's thoroughly mixed into an even batter, microwave the whole shebang for three minutes on high. Watch how high it rises from the cup in the video below:

When you hear that BEEEP of completion, you'll have yourself a piping hot, single-serving cake in a cup. In the name of research (ahem), I gave this a try myself this afternoon, and the result was—well, not the best cake I've ever had.

Windows only: Some browsers stash all your bookmarks and their metadata in a single folder that's easy to import to any other browser. For everything else, Transmute makes the work of shuttling bookmarks between Windows browsers much simpler. The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy. That's about it, but that's certainly no small feat. Transmute is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET 2.0 framework to operate.

Windows only: Lifehacker highlighted some disk space visualization tools with all kinds of neat graphics, but Treesize Free shoots for just the opposite—a clean, simple interface showing how much of your hard drive is filled by which folders. As you might guess, it stacks up the root folders by size, then lets you collapse them in nesting trees to see which sub-folders are eating up that 160GB drive you thought you'd never fill. You can adjust for KB/MB/GB viewing, scan CDs and removable drives, and switch to percentages instead of data bits, but one of Treesize's really cool features is simply giving you all the same tools you have in Windows Explorer's right-click menu on its tree view pane—delete, copy, cut, etc. Treesize Free is a free download for Windows systems only.