Features new to Windows 7

Some of the new features included in Windows 7 are advancements in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, support for additional file formats, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.

Windows 7 retains the Windows Aero graphical user interface and visual style introduced in the operating system's predecessor, Windows Vista, but many areas have seen enhancements. Unlike Windows Vista, window borders and the taskbar do not turn opaque when a window is maximized when Windows Aero is active; instead, they remain translucent.

Support for themes has been extended in Windows 7. In addition to providing options to customize colors of window chrome and other aspects of the interface, including the desktop background, desktop icons, mouse cursors, and sound schemes, the operating system also includes a native desktop slideshow feature. A new theme pack extension has been introduced, .themepack, which are essentially cabinet files that consist of theme resources including background images, color preferences, desktop icons, mouse cursors, and sound schemes. The new theme extension simplies sharing of themes, and can also display desktop wallpapers via RSS feeds provided by the Windows RSS Platform. Microsoft provides additional themes for free through its website.

The default theme included with Windows 7 is a namesake theme, and consists of a single desktop wallpaper named "Harmony" and the default desktop icons, mouse cursors, and sound scheme introduced in Windows Vista; however, none of the desktop backgrounds included with Windows Vista are present in Windows 7. Additional themes are also included: Architecture, Characters, Landscapes, Nature, and Scenes, and an additional country-specific theme that is determined based on the defined locale when the operating system is installed; all themes included in Windows 7, excluding the default theme, include six wallpaper images. While only the theme for a user's home country is displayed within the user interface, the files for all of these other country-specific themes are included in the operating system. A number of new sound schemes, each associated with an included theme, have also been introduced: Afternoon, Calligraphy, Characters, Cityscape, Delta, Festival, Garden, Heritage, Landscape, Quirky, Raga, Savana, and Sonata. Though itself not a new feature, individual sound schemes can be used within custom themes as well.

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Wikipedia