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Make the Most of Win 7 Libraries Before your new operating system can be useful, you need to understand how it organizes your data. By Neil Randall
W
indows 7 has its share of highly visible user interface tweaks. After getting past the oohs and aahs of the spiffedup taskbar, you’ll likely find the new look of good old Explorer the most dramatic difference. Click the Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar, or open Computer from the Start menu, and you’ll get a window that displays not only the standard expandable hard drive labels but also a new feature called Libraries. Win 7 Libraries are, in effect, metafolders.
The idea behind them is simple: We have massive hard drives with files scattered all over the place, and organizing our resources by hard drive and folders (which are always tied to a hard drive) is inefficient. Like Vista, Win 7 provides a Favorites system to help with organization—you drag a folder to the Navigation pane, creating a link to that folder—but Libraries carries organization an important level further. Win 7 ships with four libraries already in place: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Of course, Vista and XP included folders called Documents or My Documents, Music the library concept Each library in your Windows 7 system groups similar files that can exist anywhere in your system, or on your network.
70 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION NOVEMBER 2009
