We are seeing location awareness features become more prominent in smartphones in recent times. GPS-enabled smartphones make it easy to get directions, weather, and many more location based services since they automatically know where you are. Well now you can get features like this on your Windows 7 machine thanks to Geosense.
Now normally you would need a GPS chip for a feature like this to work, but Geosense can achieve the same results by looking up IP addresses, Wi-Fi and Cell Tower triangulation.
Windows 7 introduced the new Sensors and Location platform that would let Windows automatically respond to environmental changes sensed by light, orientation sensors, or GPS chips. Unfortunately, most laptops today are not equipped with GPS chips. Thanks to Geosense, however, you can still use the location platform. Geosense lists itself as a sensor in the Windows Sensors and Locations, so once you’ve installed it, all location-aware applications and services will be able to pick up your location from it.
However, please note that Geosense only works on Windows 7 Home Premium and higher, as Windows 7 Starter doesn’t include the Sensors and Locations platform.
- So firstly go and download a copy of Geosense from here, either 32bit or 64bit depending on your OS and install it. While it’s installing it will ask you if you want to install the driver, accept this and any other UAC prompts that appear.
- Once it’s installed, make sure Geosense is enabled by going to Start -> and type in “Location” and select “Location and Other Sensors”.
- You should then see Geosense listed as a sensor, if it’s not enabled check the box beside it.
- So that’s it set up and ready to use, not that many applications make use of location awareness features yet but we can easily test it to see if its working using the weather widget. Once Geosense is installed you should see a little grey icon in the weather widget indicating that it’s installed.
- Then click the settings icon “spanner” and select get location automatically, the icon will then turn blue indicating that it’s using Geosense to work out your location.
Sometimes Geosense will be wrong or it won’t be able to detect your location, in this case it will display a red icon 
- You can also use Geosense in Google Maps, however this feature doesn’t work in normal Google Maps, you need to download a separate app first from here. This will then open up Google maps showing your current location.
So that’s it, there’s Geosense, for now it’s very limited with what you can do, but hopefully in the future we will see more apps developed to take advantage of this new feature in Windows 7 and it will become more practical to use.
Source:
HowToGeek ( full credit to them for the images as well )
