Unhide hidden non-U.S. Windows 7 wallpapers

When you install Windows 7 (or buy a PC based on it), you’ll find a set of wallpapers installed that correspond to the country that was specified at install time. Assuming you’re in the United States, you’ll get the U.S. great-outdoors treatment, replete with national-park eye candy and other scenic shots. All well and good, but you can uncover some international wallpapers in Windows, if you feel like dressing up your Windows with foreign flair.

The wallpaper files reside in a directory you can’t see unless you know where to look, however. Look in C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT, if the folder is visible in Windows Explorer. (It may not be; if not, skip ahead to the end of this tip to learn how to uncover it.) There, you should see several folders. On our install, the folders were labeled AU, CA, GB, US, and ZA, containing image sets for Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States, and South Africa. Inside each of these folders is a folder called “Theme”; to import one of these national theme sets, open the theme folder and double-click on the file inside ending in a “.theme” extension.

Doing so will make the theme available in the Personalization dialog box. To access it, right-click on an empty area of the Windows Desktop, and select Personalize from the pop-up menu; you should see the new theme under My Themes. Double-click on a theme to make it live. Note: You can right-click on the Windows Desktop and choose Next desktop background to cycle through different wallpapers in the theme set.

It’s possible, though, that you couldn’t see the MCT folder where we specified. If so, hit the Windows key + R key combination, which will bring up the Run box. In the box, type (or paste in) the following text, and then hit Enter:

%systemroot%/Globalization/MCT

This should launch the hidden folders in a new Explorer window. If still nothing appears, though, you need to, in the resulting window, hit the Organize button, select Folder and search options, and click on the View tab. In the ensuing list, you’ll need to do two things: uncheck the box next to Hide protected operating system files and click the radio button next to Show hidden files, folders, and drives. Hit Apply, then OK, and the folders should show up.

Incidentally, you can also download other themes at Microsoft’s Personalization Gallery. It was a bit scanty when we looked at it (just before Windows 7’s official release date), but the company says that it should offer more themes with the full release of the operating system.

And a bonus! You can go to the Microsoft Musings blog (not affiliated with Microsoft itself) to download a huge ZIP file of lots of other official Windows wallpapers, compiled by this blogger. A lot of genuinely striking sample backgrounds have come and gone through the various Windows 7 builds and release candidates, including some psychedelic ones and many, many more international themes.

Use a hidden Windows 7 report to monitor your laptop’s power efficiency

One of the biggest complaints about Vista was that it tended to drain laptop batteries with greater abandon than XP. While we don’t expect Windows 7 to offer huge improvements in that department, Microsoft is putting more of that control in the users’ hands.
In Windows 7, you can observe your PC’s power efficiency and tweak settings to get the most out of your battery and the best balance between performance and endurance. Doing so is a little techie, but it’s not hard.
In the Start menu, type in cmd. Then, when the cmd.exe icon appears, right-click it, and choose “Run as an administrator.” At the command line that pops up, type powercfg –energy and hit Enter. At this point, Windows 7 will scan your system (it will take a minute or two) and publish a report in the folder indicated by the command line. Follow the path indicated to the file—it’ll be an HTML document—and look through the suggestions. Here's what we saw:

In our report, for instance, we got a handful of pink error messages stating that our power settings weren’t set for optimal battery life. Those are pretty easy to fix: Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, then select which plan you’d like and click Edit Plan Settings. From there, you can tweak to your heart’s content. We also got a handful of yellow warning messages, such as “Power Policy: Disk timeout is long (On Battery).” Our hard drive was set to turn off after 1,000 minutes, but this warning suggests keeping that time to less than 30 minutes so that if the hard drive doesn’t need to be spinning, it can turn off after a given amount of time. The trade-off (and yes, there’s always a trade-off) is that when you choose a task that requires it to spin back up again, it can be slow in doing so.
This is a good report to run, so that, at the very least, you can get an idea of which settings affect power consumption. Once you have that knowledge, tweaking those settings is pretty simple.