If you are using Windows 7 at home, but your company or your old laptop is still running Windows XP, you may find it inconvenient not being able to use the hotkeys you are familiar with in Windows 7. In this article, I’ll introduce 2 tools that could help you get rid of that issue to some extent.
1. Windows 7 Shortcuts
Windows 7 Shortcuts can enable some useful Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts for Windows XP. It created by one of the readers of the popular productivity blog Lifehacker and was written in AutoHotkey. Hence, you can always add scripts to the source code if you are an AHK user. The tool adds some important Windows 7 shortcuts like Win+left/right/up/down arrow for moving the active window, win+space for quickly showing the desktop and win+home to minimize all the windows except for the active window.
2. WinHotKey
A bit different from Windows 7 Shortcuts, WinHotKey is a tiny program that helps you configure system wide hotkeys. You can set keyboard shortcuts to get Windows 7 like functions. (Though there is some difference in the key sequences.) As shown in the screenshot above, WinHotKey has already preset some hotkeys to execute common actions. For example, press Win+I and you can launch Internet Explorer. You can click “New Key” button to define a new system wide hotkey. You could create all kinds of shortcuts with this software. Lets take the “Maximize the active window” action (Win+Up arrow hotkey in Windows 7) as an example. Define the key sequence (here I set “Windows+W”), and then select “Control the Current Window”, “Maximum to the Screen”. Click OK and now you can maximize the active window by pressing Win+W. That’s it. That’s how you could do it for other shortcuts too. Windows XP users, do you know of any other such tools? Do share in the comments. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
