Make Your Windows 7 PC Location Aware Using Geosense

If you use a Smartphone, such as a Motorola Droid, Nexus One, or an iPhone, you must be very accustomed to their geo location based apps. For instance, you get the latest weather, directions from your current location automatically on these GPS-enabled devices. Though Windows 7 comes equipped with a Sensors and Location platform, there are not many laptops or net books out there that come equipped with GPS enabled hardware.

Geosense, a newly released freeware program acts as a software based geographic sensor. Geosense tries to locate your PC with the help of your Computer’s IP address, Wi-Fi access points around you, and cell tower triangulation. Geosense installs itself as a location sensor, so don’t be surprised if takes a while for the installation to get completed. Once installed you will find it listed in the ‘Location and Other Sensors’ (Control Panel –> Hardware and Sound –> Locations and Sensors) applet of Control Panel. Select the ‘Enabled’ check box and click ‘Apply’ to complete the installation.

You should now be able to see Geosense in your system tray. By right clicking on it, you get access to the ‘Location and other Sensors’ Control Panel applet, as well as an event log of location activity. The Weather gadget of Windows 7 is location aware, so you can test Geosense by configuring the Weather gadget to ‘Find location automatically’ from it’s settings menu.

Don’t worry, if your weather gadget shows you a blue error icon (see screenshot below). This happens because Geosense is unable to determine your correct location. You may also see a wrong city or place, because many times IP address look up gives inaccurate results.

Uninstalling Geosense is similar to any other software. Go to ‘Programs and Features’ applet of Control Panel (Add/Remove Programs) to uninstall it. You will find that it is automatically removed from the ‘Location and other Sensors’.

You can use location-enabled Google Maps client, a demonstration testing program from Geosense makers, or MahTweets, a geo-tagging service for Tweets and Flickr photos, to test Geosense on your Windows 7 PC. Since Location and Sensors platform is only included in Windows 7 Home Premium and higher versions, you may not be able to find this in your Windows 7 Starter PC.

At present, there are not many applications that take advantage of Windows 7’s Sensors and Location platform. So you may not find the need to have Geosense on your Windows 7 PC right away. However, things may change in future, when more applications become location aware.

Download Geosense for Windows 7

Available for both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows 7.

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