A lot of Facebook applications, particularly games, send out requests. A lot of people find these annoying since they appear in the same area as other more important invitations such as events and friend requests. You don’t have to ignore these application requests — you can actually click through and block them for good.

The next time someone sends you a request from a game or other application, click on it and look for the link that says “Block This Application”.

A pop-up dialog box will ask you to confirm or cancel the block.

After you confirm the block, you will no longer receive requests from that game/application. People often send these out because the games they’re playing give them rewards for doing so… this is a good way to ignore the requests without having to ask anyone to “knock it off”.

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When you dive into Windows 7, one of the first new features you will notice is the brand new Windows 7 taskbar. Y’know that strip across the bottom of your screen that contains the Start Button and any applications that are open? Well it’s been completely, drastically rebuilt in terms of both appearance and functionality. It looks totally different, and works nothing like what you’re used to in older versions of the operating system.

That sounds frightening

Actually, it’s exciting! The new Windows 7 taskbar is a great enhancement to Windows — it borrows ideas from Mac OS X’s Dock, combines functionality from the old taskbar and Quick Launch bar, and puts all that together into a drastically different yet intelligent and functionally simple tool for managing applications and windows.

Pinning applications to the Windows 7 taskbar

With the old taskbar, the user would launch applications from the Start button or Quick Launch bar at which time buttons for each running app would appear in the taskbar. You could then use those buttons to manage your windows.

The new Windows 7 taskbar combines window management and the launching of applications into one simplified interface. Icons for running applications appear in the Win 7 taskbar with a border around the graphic. You may think this simply means that we’ve switched from rectangular buttons to square icons, but that’s not where things end. In addition to icons for running apps, any other application can be “pinned” to the Windows 7 taskbar. Its icon will stay put whether or not the app is running. When you launch an app, its icon will be highlighted with a border to differentiate it from other icons for dormant applications.

In the screenshot above, you can clearly see these taskbar enhancements at work. The icons for Firefox, iTunes and MS Paint are all surrounded by a border since they’ve been launched. The other icons such as those for XBMC and Picasa do not have borders — they’ve been pinned to the taskbar and stay in place, waiting for me to launch them with a single click.

Peeking at running applications

When your mouse hovers over the icon of a running application in the Windows 7 taskbar, you will see a small thumbnail preview appear. You can close applications from their preview, interact with them, and peek at them — peeking makes every other window go transparent except the one at which you are peeking.

In this screenshot, you can see how “peeking” works. Why is Firefox open? What did I last do in that application? I hover my mouse over the Firefox icon and the little preview appears, letting me know that, oh yes, I was watching an episode of House on Hulu.

Familiar taskbar elements

The Windows 7 taskbar contains the familiar system tray, clock and notification area on the far right side. The system tray has been minimized and shows only a few icons unless you elect to see more. Notifications — like those little yellow bubbles in XP — appear in a small message window. You can customize how these behave and choose to hide notifications from specific applications.

We think you’ll like it

The new Windows 7 taskbar brings significant change to the way in which users launch applications and manage windows — and we think you’ll like it. It may sound as if the new taskbar has gotten more complicated, but in reality it is a compact, sophisticated tool that is simple to use. Once you learn the ins and outs of Windows 7’s new taskbar you may very well find yourself working much more efficiently.

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Sticky Keys is an accessibility feature of Windows that locks certain keys when they’re pressed. Some people, especially gamers who have a habit of tapping the same key many times in a row, find themselves getting tripped up when Sticky Keys turns itself on automatically. We’ve previously covered how to turn off Sticky Keys in Windows 7, and now we will show you how to disable the feature permanently.

Browse to the Sticky Keys Setup area

• Click Start.
• Click the Ease of Access heading.
• Click “Change how your keyboard works”.
• Click “Set up Sticky Keys” (or press ALT+C).

Disable Sticky Keys

First of all, if Sticky Keys is on then you will probably want to turn it off — remove the check mark from the box next to “Turn on Sticky Keys” (if it’s checked).

Next, un-check “Turn on Sticky Keys when SHIFT is pressed five times”. This will prevent Windows 7 from turning on Sticky Keys automatically in the future.

Press the OK button to save your changes, and you should no longer see the Sticky Keys popup warning you that the feature has detected your key presses and decided to activate itself.

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The Sticky Keys feature of Windows 7 can be turned off by one of two ways:

1. Turn it off with a keyboard shortcut.
2. Turn it off from the Control Panel.

Turn off Sticky Keys with a keyboard shortcut

If you have accidentally activated Sticky Keys, you can quickly turn it off by pressing both SHIFT keys at the same time.

Turn off Sticky Keys from the Control Panel

The Sticky Keys feature can also be turned off in Windows 7 via the Control Panel:

• Click Start → Control Panel → Ease of Access → Change how your keyboard works.
• Locate the “Make it easier to type” heading.
• Remove the check mark from the box next to “Turn on Sticky Keys”.

If there is no check mark next to this option, Sticky Keys is not on.

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Filter Keys is a Windows feature that kicks in whenever you hold down a key for 8 seconds or longer. It’s meant to be an accessibility feature that makes your keyboard easier to use, but often times it ends up confusing users who don’t understand why their keyboard has briefly stopped responding. We previously covered how to turn off Filter Keys in Windows XP and Vista. This article addresses how to turn off/disable the same feature in Windows 7.

Turn off Filter Keys in Windows 7

If Filter Keys has turned on and your keyboard is no longer responding as you would like, follow these directions in order to turn off Filter Keys:

1. Click Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click the Ease of Access heading.
4. Click Change how your keyboard works.
5. Remove the check mark in the box next to “Turn on Filter Keys”.
6. Click the OK button.

Disable Filter Keys from the Windows 7 Control Panel

You can also disable Filter Keys by doing the following:

1. Go to the same Ease of Access screen… click Start → Control Panel → Ease of Access → Change how your keyboard works.
2. Click the blue Set up Filter Keys link.
3. Under Keyboard shortcut, remove the check mark from the box next to “Turn on Filter Keys when right SHIFT is pressed for 8 seconds”.
4. Click the OK button.

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Plant a lot of profitable crops

The number one method of quickly earning money in FarmVille is to maximize the profitability of your harvest. Don’t worry about buying buildings or decorations at first — fill your entire farm with crops, choose the seeds that will make you the most money and plant them as often as possible.

Expand

If you can afford to expand your farm, you can then grow more crops at once thereby increasing your hourly earnings. Even better is if you can build up enough neighbors to get the farm expansions for free.

Be a good neighbor

Go to FarmVille’s “My Neighbors” page and add every one of your friends who plays the game. You can help out on each neighbor’s farm once per day, which earns you coins and experience.

Give and you shall receive

Each day you are permitted to send up to 25 neighbors a free gift. Click on FarmVille’s “Free Gifts” tab, choose the gift you wish to send, click the “Proceed to Send” button and select up to 25 neighbors to receive the gift. Hopefully your friends will appreciate the free gifts and send some back to you in return.

Some of the best gifts to receive are trees and animals. Trees grow fruit and animals give wool, milk and other products which can be harvested for coins. You don’t have to spend coins maintaining these gifts, so they can just sit on the side of your farm slowly earning money (line them up along the outer edges so they don’t consume space that would be better used for growing crops).

Celebrate your neighbors’ accomplishments

Keep an eye on the FarmVille notifications that show up in your Facebook news feed. When your neighbors earn ribbons you can click the “Get a bonus from [person's name]!” link to get some free coins. You can only do this once per notification, and in a timely manner — trying to collect old bonuses will just trigger a message saying that the celebration has ended.

Collect for your own achievements

FarmVille awards “achievements” when you meet various criteria. Each achievement gets you a bonus in both coins and XP. Achievements are awarded for doing things like adding neighbors, adopting animals, taking pictures, planting a lot of crops, giving gifts, etc…

Adopt animals found by your neighbors

From time-to-time your neighbors will find stray animals and put them up for adoption in their news feed. If you are the first to see the notice, you can adopt the animal, stick it on the side of your farm and earn a little money from whatever it produces.

Get coins from the daily raffle

There’s a daily raffle that will often give you a few coins just for logging into FarmVille.

Enjoy your hard-earned cash

Eventually you’ll build up a stockpile of cash and earn enough experience to plant seeds that are high earners requiring minimal care. Buy some fun decorations and build an impressive farm!

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Windows 7 makes burning files to a blank DVD much easier with its enhancements to Windows Explorer. In the past many people used third party software to burn blank DVDs, but now this can be accomplished through Windows Explorer. The process for burning files to a DVD in Win7 is as follows:

1. Insert a blank DVD disc into the drive.
2. Choose Burn files to disc using Windows Explorer.
3. Choose which type of disc you want to burn.
4. Add files to the blank disc.
5. Burn your disc.

For more detailed instructions and screenshots, visit our tutorial “How to Burn Files to a CD or DVD in Windows 7”. Since the process for burning files to both CDs and DVDs has been unified under Explorer in Windows 7, we’ve written one expanded article to cover both topics.

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Can I open .7z Files in Windows 7?

.7z files are archive files generated with the 7-Zip software, and yes, you can indeed open these files in Windows 7. The latest release of the 7-Zip File Manager works with Windows 7.

Get the 7-Zip software

You will need to download and install the 7-Zip software in order to work with these types of files. I used the 32-bit .exe file, but if you know that you have a 64-bit system be sure to download the appropriate .msi installer.

Open a .7z file

Once the 7-Zip software is installed, it will add a helpful new option to your Windows 7 context menu.

1. Right-click on a .7z file. The right-click context menu will appear.
2. Click “7-Zip”.
3. Choose one of the options for extracting the file.

I chose “Extract Here” to put the .7z archive’s contents in the same location as the original file – on my desktop – but you can also choose to extract it to a folder with the same name as the archive, or pick “Extract files…” for more options.

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My Facebook news feed is full of updates from the games my friends are playing. How can I get rid of all these notices?

You can hide a game or application from your Facebook news feed with the “Hide Application” option. Find one of these annoying notifications in your newsfeed and look for the light gray “Hide” link in the top right corner of the status update. The pull-down menu will have an option to hide that application — click it.

In the screenshot above, you can see that this notification from the game Farmville contains an option to “Hide Farmville”. Once you click the “Hide (Application Name)” button, you’ll see a confirmation stating that you’ll no longer see messages from that application in your news feed.

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FarmVille is an addictive Facebook game in which players build and manage their own farms — players grow crops, raise animals and construct barns, houses and fences. New FarmVille players start out with a handful of complimentary crops, but quickly begin asking themselves “what are the best crops to plant on my farm?“ I spent a few minutes putting together a spreadsheet that answers this question for you.

How do you figure out which crops are best to plant?

We can use a number of factors to determine which crops will perform best:

• Purchase and Sale Price — Planting a patch of seeds costs money, and different seeds have different values once it’s time to sell your harvest.
• Plowing Costs — In addition to the cost of buying seeds, you must spend coins in order to plow a patch of land before seeds can be planted.
• Harvest Time — Each crop has its own harvest time… some mature quickly, while others won’t be ready for days.

We can determine the net of planting a batch of seeds with the following formula:

Net = Sale Price − (Purchase Price + Plowing Cost)

But is that enough? No… we still have not considered how long it takes to harvest each type of crop. If we divide the net by the harvest time, we find out how much we’ll profit from that crop per hour:

Profit per Hour = Net ÷ Harvest Time

Crop Profitability Table

Note: one FarmVille day is 23 hours.

Using the table above, one can determine which of their available seeds would be the most profitable to farm. For example, a beginner planting a 12 × 12 farm of raspberries could potentially make 18,216 coins per day — (5.5 × 144) × 23 hours.

It’s tempting to start planting something with a high sale price such as wheat, but in reality its three-day harvest time quickly offsets the 115 coin payout. Berries are cheaper and mature faster, making them a much better choice for beginners who want to build up their money and experience. Of course, if you don’t have the time in your day to return after a few hours and collect your berry harvest, the plants will whither and you’ll take a loss…

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