On a side note: If you want to change the display in the Control Panel you need to press Windows-R, type gpedit.msc and hit enter. Then locate User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel in the sidebar and there the preference Always open All Control Panel Items when opening Control Panel. Double-click the preference and enable it in the window that opens.

Users without the Group Policy Editor can make the change directly in the Windows Registry by pressing Windows-R, typing regedit and hitting the enter key. They need to navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer, locate the parameter ForceClassicControlPanel and change the value to 1. A restart, log off / on may be required before the changes become visible this way.

Back to adding Control Panel items to the Windows 7 taskbar to launch them faster. When you launch the Control Panel an icon gets placed in the Windows 7 taskbar. The jumplist menu is displayed on a right-click, and we are going to use this menu to place Control Panel items in it. Here is what you need to do.

Open the Windows Control Panel and drag and drop items that you work with regularly to the taskbar icon. That’s it. Windows will pin the Control Panel to the taskbar, but it can be removed if it should not stay there. The jumplist items are there on every start, so that the items can be started with a right-click on the icon in the taskbar and a left-click on the desired item.

Have another tip that you want to share? Let us know in the comments.

Jumplists display often used program features and links to recent documents. Not every software supports Jumplists yet, but it is likely that support will increase in the coming years. Many Microsoft applications among others support them on the other hand.

The Microsoft Excel Jumplist for instance displays options to create a new Excel document, or open one of the previously accessed spreadsheets. That’s more comfortable than having to either open Excel to load the spreadsheet, or locate the spreadsheet on the system to load it in the program.

Taskbar previews display thumbnail or text previews of all open instances of a program when the mouse cursor hovers over the item.

Tip 1: Faster Task Switching

Users who want to switch between open instances of a program need to move the mouse cursor over the icon in the Windows 7 Taskbar to make the instances visible, before clicking on one to bring it to the front.

It may be necessary sometimes to switch between multiple open program windows in rapid succession. This cannot be done efficiently the standard way. A faster option is to hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard before clicking on the taskbar icon itself. This switches to the next open program window with each click.

Tip 2: Faster Jumplist Selection

Jumplists sometimes display lots of entries, and it can take some time to find the desired action or recently opened document or file in the listing.

A faster way of accessing specific items is to press the first letter of the file name or function after the jumplist has been opened. This automatically moves the selection to the first matching entry, which can then be accessed by pressing Enter.

The recent items that are displayed can be a security and privacy risk. Even more so as there are no obvious means to delete and manage them effectively. The only option that a user has is to right-click specific recent items in the jumplist for options to delete that item.

There is no option to delete all items or to exclude items from being displayed in the jumplist.

What most Windows 7 users do not know is that Microsoft is storing the recent items list in a super-hidden directory that cannot be accessed directly in Windows Explorer. One of the options to access that directory is to copy and paste the following path into the Windows Explorer address bar.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

This will display a list of encoded file. Each file contains the information of a specific jumplist. It is however not easy to link those files to a jumplist. The only viable way to do that is to open the items in that folder in a text editor and search for recent items that are in the jumplist currently.

An easier way is to delete all files in the directory which will remove all recent items in every jumplist. This process can be automated with the command

del %appdata%\microsoft\windows\recent\automaticdestinations\*

Experienced users can add this to the Windows Task Scheduler to run the command on every shutdown of the system. (via How To Clear Recent Jumplist Items at Windows 7 News)

The latest dev version of Google Chrome is now offering jumplist support in Windows 7. The jumplist can be opened by right-clicking the Google Chrome icon in the Windows taskbar. The Google Chrome jumplist is divided into four areas of which three are always visible and one only if the user has added at least one item to it.

The Google Browser will display the most visited websites, the recently closed websites and tasks in the jumplist. The most visited and recent websites are directly taken from the web browser’s history while the task allow the user to open a new window (either normal or in incognito mode).

The fourth group only becomes available if the user pins an element in the jumplist. This is for example excellent for quickly accessing favorite websites from the Windows 7 jumplist. The latest developer build of Google Chrome can be downloaded from the dev channel page. It is interesting to see that the Google Chrome development team has added jumplist support while the Mozilla Firefox team has not shown any signs that they intend to support that feature in the near future.

source IThinkDiff

It is furthermore possible to drag folders into the jumplists which can be a very comfortable way of linking folders to specific applications. This could for example link download folders and P2P applications, document folders and word processing applications or movie players and movie folders.

While it is possible to drag folders into the jumplists menus it is not possible to do the same with applications. This would also be interesting in cases where applications are used together. It could for instance be useful for webmasters and bloggers to link a web browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome with software programs that can take screenshots or upload files to ftp servers.

Jumplist Launcher has been designed for this purpose. While it does not provide the means to drag and drop applications into existing jumplists it offers its own jumplist that can be used to add programs to it. These computer programs can be grouped for quicker access. The Jumplist Launcher can list up to 60 different applications in its interface. Names and icons are customizable giving the user full control over how and where the applications are displayed.

Jumplist Launcher is compatible with Windows 7.