Finally, finally, I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 and it's pretty, but the interface is a lot slower. Is there some way to turn off some of the fancy zoom, shadow and transparency effects so Win7 speeds up?

I think I have automatic updates set for my Windows PC, but it never seems to tell me there's an update, and my experience with Windows and Microsoft is that there are updates typically every week or so. Is there some way i can manually run a Windows Update to see if there's anything pending or available for my Win7 laptop?

I'm confused: It used to be that when I closed windows -- really, minimized windows -- in Windows 7 that they'd show up as a tab along the bottom in the Taskbar. Now, however, a lot of them just vanish. They're still there, the app's still running, but the Taskbar is all too often empty. What happened to my Win7 programs?

I don't know if I'm just getting old or what, but the text in my version of Microsoft Windows is tiny and I want to make it bigger. You know, the labels underneath icons, the text in dialog boxes, etc. I know there's a way to do that: how do I make the text in my Windows theme larger or bigger?

Every time I plug in my iPhone to my Toshiba PC laptop running Microsoft Windows 7, it promptly tries to import all the pictures and place copies of them into "My Pictures". It's driving me crazy. How the heck do I stop Windows trying to import my iPhone photos?

I don't know what my son did when he was installing his latest game, but when I put music CDs into my Dell PC (running Microsoft Windows 7 if it matters) the Zune Player app is launched rather than my preferred application Windows Media Player. It's frustrating and when I went to change the default programs [ed note: see Change Default Programs in Windows 7] I couldn't see anything for music CDs. How do I fix this?

My brother gave me his Apple iPod Nano because he's now just using his iPhone and it's sweet, but it's paired to his Mac. I have a Dell laptop running Windows 7, tho, and want to put my music on it. What's the easy way to reformat it and start from scratch with my iPod?

For reasons that I can't figure out, my Windows 7 laptop thinks that everything's fine with the sound system, but I can't actually hear anything when I try to play music or watch videos on YouTube. Is there some easy way to diagnose these sort of sound or audio problems on Win7?

When I click "Start" to open the menu window in Microsoft Windows 7, the "Search" choice (above recent items) is missing. How can I add it to my start menu?

i have Windows 7 and all the settings are totally different to WIndows XP and I cannot find the display settings to alter sleep time. Help!

This may seem obvious, but I'm used to "Update Windows" as an option in my Start menu and it's not there any more in Windows 7. How do I update my Windows 7 installation to ensure it stays up-to-date on patches, etc?

Every so often I go to download some software for my Acer Windows PC and have to decide between a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the application. I'm running Windows Vista but when I look, it just says that I'm running "Home Premium". How do I know if I'm running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows?