Add Up Articles Directory | Free Articals | New Articles Daily | How to easily open new windows in windows 7

The operating system of Windows 7 is quite different from the previous versions of windows. And unlike its predecessor, Windows Vista, which introduced a large number of new features, Windows 7 was intended to be a more focused. When you have opened some program, instead of seeing long information bar, you just get the little icon of the program next to your start menu.

Instead of seeing multiple separate taskbar entries or a taskbar entry with a number inside of parentheses indicating how many instances when you have opened more than one instance of a program open or you have open, you simply see slightly offset versions of the icon layered over top of each other.

Windows 7 allows people to see what’s in each of the instances, and even offers you some controls over those programs directly from the taskbar. When you mouse over the taskbar entry, all of the currently open instances of that program are shown in preview windows. For all programs, you then have the option to close that window/instance of the program directly from the taskbar (by clicking the red X in the top right corner of the preview window). For some programs, you get even more options. For instance, in multimedia programs like Windows Media Player, Zune and iTunes, you can play, pause and skip (and, in the case of Zune, to “favorite” a track).

Anyway, most of that is off-topic and just meant as a little bit of exposition. The problem I had when I first updated to Windows 7 was that I couldn’t figure out how to easily open a new instance of any program if I already had one open. This was especially true when using the Windows Explorer (the program that the My Computer shortcut opens, not referring to Internet Explorer here). If you already had one instance of Windows Explorer running, clicking on that entry in the taskbar would simply either focus the window or minimize/restore the window. You couldn’t open a second Windows Explorer window from there.

To open another instance of Explorer, I figured I had two options. The one is to click the My Computer shortcut in the Start menu. The other is to use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+N to open a new window. I used to middle-clicking on a browser tab to close it, and once I inadvertently middle-clicked on a taskbar entry trying to close the program. Something surprise to me happened, that a new instance of the program is opened. How happy I am, because this has disturbed me for a long time.