BANGALORE, INDIA: Ever since Windows has been around, especially since the time of Windows 95, there have a been a number of applications bundled with the OS that have had their uses. Some of these like Calculator, WordPad and Paint, have always been around, but never really seen too many changes as the years have gone by. Other applications like a Movie Maker and a mail client (Outlook Express/Windows Mail), etc. were introduced later and have had minor changes with each update.

Windows 7 radically changes all of these. All the built-in applications get extreme makeovers. So much so that at first glance you might wonder if you are actually running the application you have known for so long or whether it's a third party one.

Another change that you will see is that some of the apps that you were introduced to in Vista seem to have been removed, but not completely as you will see. We'll take a look at some of the significant changes in applications in Win7.

Calculator
This tiny applet that has been around since Windows 1.0 is probably something that everyone uses very often to do small calculations. Calculator has not seen any major improvement in all these years, but finally gets a massive makeover in Windows 7 that makes it much more useful than before.

At the basic level, Calculator looks much like its earlier counterparts, albeit with some color changes. However, even in this mode, there are some changes that can really make a huge difference to how you use this app. The first change is that Calculator maintains a history of the calculations you have done.

And you can browse through these by clicking on the desired one or by using the arrow buttons on top of the 'screen'. Another major change is that you can even edit a previous calculation in case you made a mistake in any of the values you entered by simply double clicking on it.

You now also have a number of new modes for it other than the Basic and Scientific ones that have been around. You now also get a Programmer and a Statistics mode. Not only these you also get a number of handy tools to perform common calculations as well.

First, you get a Unit Converter that lets you convert between different units of different types. For instance, you can select types such as Temperature, Angle, Speed, Length, Area and many more and select to convert between different units such as C-F, Meter-Feet, Mile-Km, and more.

Next, you also get a nice date converter that lets you find the difference between two dates or add/remove days to a date. And finally you get an option to perform some template based calculations for Gas Mileage, Lease Estimation and Mortgage Estimation. If you are planning to take a loan to purchase a car or house, this last one can be a huge timesaver.