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...

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.

Microsoft has already caught some flack for "copying" the OS X dock with the new Windows 7 taskbar; the video above from the Professional Developer's Conference both addresses that criticism and takes you on a guided tour of the new taskbar. Whether or not you think Windows 7 borrowed from OS X with the update, there's no question that Microsoft added its own flair and probably even improved the taskbar/dock concept, particularly with the peek feature. Still, why not weigh in yourself.

Windows only: Anyone who uses email can dig up a popular forwarded message or deep conversation thread rendered nearly unreadable by formatting along the way. StripMail is a free program that not only strips the > characters out, no matter how many layers deep, but it can format the resulting text back into paragraphs. From this:

To this:

To reformat your message, you have to copy and paste its text from your email client into StripMail. StripMail is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Free application FastCopy is a portable replacement for the standard Windows Explorer file copying mechanism. FastCopy's interface is rather cluttered but the file transfer speeds are fantastic. Copying ISO files, thousands of pictures, and other test files was extremely fast. You can opt to not overwrite, overwrite by newest or biggest file, and sync when transferring files with FastCopy. Lifehacker covered another popular file copier replacement here before, TeraCopy, and you might be wondering how FastCopy stacks up against it.

In the informal testing FastCopy beat TeraCopy by a small to large margin depending on the type of file copy operation. When copying large batches of small files like 2-3MB JPEGs, FastCopy beat Teracopy by a nearly 800% margin. Performance decreased when copying larger files like DVD ISOs, but FastCopy still edged out TeraCopy by around 100%. Both programs can be used as portable USB apps, both have Windows shell integration with right click and drag and drop extensions, and both have a file transfer verification. TeraCopy has the ability to pause transfers, a feature absent from FastCopy. As mentioned above the interface of FastCopy is very cluttered and dull, so if looks matter, the vote definitely goes to TeraCopy for a much cleaner GUI. FastCopy is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Application Monitor is a free utility that monitors user-specified applications to ensure they're running. If a program is not running, Application Monitor restarts it. Let's say, for example, your roommate is prone to shutting down your BitTorrent client when you're away from your computer. You return home expecting the movie you'd been downloading to be ready for your viewing pleasure, then discover the download hasn't even been running. If you had set Application Monitor to keep an eye on your BitTorrent client, it would have automatically restarted your BitTorrent app and you'd be enjoying a fresh bowl of popcorn right now. Application Monitor isn't something you'd want to set up with every application on your system, but under the right circumstances it's really handy. OS X users, check out Lingon.

Windows only: TrayEverything is a lightweight portable application that minimizes windows to the system tray even when the program lacks native support for being parked in the tray. In addition to simply minimizing windows to the tray, TrayEverything also has options to add a button to the title bar of windows for minimizing to the tray, hot keys to minimize, and even using inactivity as a trigger to send a window to the tray. If you'd like to keep a program running but don't need to tend to it or would like to make sure nobody messes with it, TrayEverything can minimize it without a visible icon in the tray and even password-protect it. TrayEverything is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Free application Desktop Renamer allows you to edit the names of default Windows icons on your desktop. If you've ever tried renaming shortcuts to destinations like your Recycle Bin, My Computer, My Documents, or My Network Places, you know that Windows isn't always keen on the adjustment. But if you're not happy with that restriction, Desktop Renamer allows you to easily rename any of those shortcuts.

On the other hand, if you feel like using an application to do something as simple as renaming Windows shortcuts seems like overkill, the gHacks weblog also details how to tweak your Windows registry to accomplish the same thing.

Windows only: Attribute Changer, a free right-click utility, gives you total control over everything reported by a file to your system. Right-click one or many files and choose "Change Attributes," and you can enable or disable read-only status, hiding, indexing, and even NTFS compression. You can change the file's date of creation, modification and last access, and tweak a photo's time of taking. Great for those files that get erroneously labeled as made on Jan. 1, 1969, and always get lost in searches, or fixing date issues with a photo collection. Attribute Changer is a free download for Windows systems only.

Windows/Mac/Linux: VLC 0.9.3, the bug-fixed, updated version of our favorite cross-platform, hardly-ever-fails media player, is available for download. New to this version are a revamped interface and reorganized menus, an improved playlist tool for more traditional audio-only file browsing and listening (and native playing of YouTube videos), enhanced album art and metadata tweaking, Last.fm submissions, and much more. If you've already grabbed a new copy of VLC from an update, are you liking the new menus and interface, or are you tempted to switch back? Share your take in the comments. VLC Media Player 0.9.3 is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems (Windows downloads are currently 0.9.2).

Windows only: Stop wondering where the time went and start using a timer to be more productive. Cool Timer is a small timer application with three modes: countdown, stopwatch and alarm clock. You can customize the color scheme and size of the clock to make it easier to see it at a distance, and you can assign a text message to an alarm to serve as a reminder. Included are several basic sound files like a gong, alarm clock, etc., but you can use any WAV, MP3 or MIDI file you want. If you use certain countdown times and alarms frequently, you can save them for repeat use. If you're looking for a Linux solution check out Timer Applet, for Macs check out Alarm Clock 2. Cool Timer is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Free media file converter FormatFactory is a handy all-in-one utility for taking one kind of audio, video, or picture file and converting it to another. The interface is a dead-simple drag-and-drop affair, and it's meant for running batches of files through converters—FLVs to Windows Media, MPEGs to iPod-friendly video, DVDs to DivX files, etc. You won't get a lot of options for quality control, compression rate, or other tweaks, but for some folks, that's really a benefit. FormatFactory is a free download for Windows systems only.