The portable applications offers several options to modify the behavior of the Windows 7 taskbar. It works both on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft operating system and displays the following configuration screen on startup.

Four options are available to change or add mouse-click behavior. It is for instance possible to modify right-click and middle-click functionality or add middle and double-click actions on empty space on the taskbar. The latter offer the options to show the desktop, emulate Ctrl-Alt-Tab, open the task manager or the taskbar inspector.

Taskbar Inspector? The tool is part of 7 Taskbar Tweaker. It offers several taskbar related options, for instance to reorder items within a tab group, group or ungroup items or run close or minimize commands on multiple windows at once.

Back to the main app. 7 Taskbar Tweaker has five additional configuration options:

• Grouping: Change from group by application ID to don’t group or don’t group pinned items.
• Combining: Option to force combining grouped items and to decombine on mouse hover.
• Mouse hover: Option to disable taskbar thumbnail previews
• Dropping: change from pin to taskbar to open with.
• Misc: Make pinned items smaller.

The option to change drag and drop from pinning items to the taskbar to opening them with pinned items is interesting.

7 Taskbar Tweaker is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit download at the developer website. It is only compatible with Windows 7 (and probably Windows Server 2008 R2 as well).

Update: The program has been updated recently. You can now re-group taskbar icons with the right mouse button and without the Taskbar Inspector open at the same time. Windows 7 Taskbar Tweaker is now provided as a setup, which means it is no longer portable.

Update 2: The developer homepage is no longer available. I have uploaded the latest release version of 7 Taskbar Tweaker to the Ghacks server. You can download the program from this link: 7 Taskbar Tweaker (105)

The main benefit of using the Quick Launch bar is that it takes up less space than the pinned taskbar items. Quick Launch is still available as a feature in the operating system, only that it needs to be enabled by the user before it becomes available.

Here is how the Quick Launch toolbar is enabled in Windows 7. Right-click on the Windows taskbar and select Toolbars > New Toolbar.

This opens a file browser window. Just enter the following folder path into the folder field of the browser and click the Select Folder button afterwards.

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

The Quick Launch toolbar is placed next to the system clock and system tray area in the operating system. It displays Quick Launch and clickable arrows. The arrows open the Quick Launch program list, which means that programs can be started with two clicks, a disadvantage over pinned taskbar programs which can be started with one click.

The Quick Launch toolbar can be modified to display only the program icons so that programs can be launched with just one click.

To do that right-click the toolbar again, select Lock Toolbar to unlock the toolbar and remove the two options Show Title and Show Text from the context menu. The Quick Launch bar can be removed again by clicking on Toolbars > Quick Launch.

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.

The pinned and open items on the other hand are always located on the left side of the taskbar, on the right side of the start menu orb. Some users may want to change the location, especially if they have a widescreen monitor with lots of space on the taskbar.

Some users may prefer to center the taskbar items on the taskbar to improve their accessibility. A quick hack that does not take more than a minute can take care of it.

Windows 7 users have two options for this. They need another toolbar on the taskbar. They can use an existing toolbar, for instance Desktop, or create a blank folder on the system and select that folder for a new toolbar.

All they need to do to create a new toolbar is to right-click the Windows taskbar, select Toolbars and then New Toolbar. Browse to the location of the blank folder and select it. This adds the folder to the taskbar.

Now right-click the taskbar again, and click on Lock the taskbar to unlock it. This makes it possible to move taskbar items around. The new folder toolbar is added to the right of the taskbar. Move that new toolbar to the left in front of the taskbar items. This pushes the pinned items to the middle. It is possible to extend and move toolbars by dragging and dropping the dividers in front of each toolbar.

To make it quick. Drag the new folder toolbar to the left side in front of the pinned items toolbar. Once that is done move the original toolbar to the middle to center it.

Once the position is fixed right-click the folder toolbar, and remove show text and show title from the context menu. This hides the new toolbar completely from the taskbar, and keeps the normal toolbar with the pinned items and open programs in the middle of the taskbar. Right-click the taskbar again, and lock it to finalize the change.

It is possible to undo the change by right-clicking the taskbar, selecting toolbars from the menu and then the new folder toolbar to remove it from the taskbar.

Recently I noticed a strange behavior that I could not figure out at first. Some pinned items in the taskbar would open right on their pinned icon, showing it as active from that moment on. Others however spawned a new icon in the taskbar, as if they were acting completely independent from the pinned item.

This was highly confusing, and I first thought it had something to do with pinned shortcuts who triggered this behavior. I took a closer look and found out that it was not the case. Firefox was linking directly to the Firefox executable on the hard drive and Chrome was doing the same. While a click on Firefox spawned a new item in the taskbar, a click on Chrome did not.

My next thought was that it maybe had something to do how the items were pinned on the taskbar. You know that there are different options available. It is for instance possible to drag and drop an item on the taskbar to pin it, or to right-click it in the start menu or while it is open as a normal item in the taskbar.

While I was not able to figure out what caused this odd behavior, I was able to find a fix for it. If you encounter pinned taskbar items in Windows 7 that spawn a new icon on startup do the following:

Unpin the original item, right-click the newly spawned item, right-click the program executable and select to pin it to the taskbar. Move the new pinned item to the location of the original item, close it and see if that resolved the issue. It did it for me.

Enter ShellWin, a third party software that can be used to hide and show the Windows 7 taskbar. The portable software displays a basic menu with two buttons and a pulldown selection menu.

hide windows 7 taskbar

The Hide and Show button do exactly what they are supposed to do; Hide or show the taskbar. A click on the hide button hides all of the taskbar, with the exception of the the start menu button, which remains on the screen.

The Shellwin window stays on top, to give the user options to Show the taskbar again, if it is needed. The pulldown menu can be used to display an active window on the screen, something that users would probably use the taskbar for otherwise.

windows 7 without taskbar

It is a shame that the developer has not implemented hotkeys to hide or show the taskbar more easily. As of now, the program window stays on top all the time, as this is the only way of showing the taskbar again which can interfere with any fullscreen window on the screen.

The developer has however announced to add more improvements to the program. While hotkeys have not been mentioned, the next version will include a feature to disable specific parts of the Windows 7 taskbar.

Users interested in downloading the ShellWin application to hide the taskbar in Windows 7, can download the application from the Seven Forums thread where it was announced by its developer.

We have mentioned some workarounds to pin files and folders, and drives in the taskbar in the past. Those workarounds required some manual haggling though.

The Windows 7 Taskbar Items Pinner changes that. It offers a graphical user interface to manage pinned items in the Windows 7 taskbar. Manage means that it can add and remove pinned items from it. The Microsoft .net application displays the currently pinned items, pre-defined folders and a custom item option in its interface. The pre-defined folders can be selected so that they are pinned on the taskbar. About 30 different items are available, from the Control Panel and My Computer, to Picture, Music and Video folders to Network Connections, Administrative Tools and Games.

windows 7 taskbar items pinner

Items are added by placing a checkmark into their box. The changes are immediately visible in the taskbar. The currently pinned items display all items that are pinned in the taskbar, sands the special folders which are indicated with a checkmark on the left. It is possible to select a pinned item, and then unpin item to remove it from the taskbar.

The option to add custom items to the taskbar is probably the most used of the program. Users can add a path and icon of an item that they want to add. The file browser makes the selection dead easy.

windows7taskbar

It is also possible to add websites to the taskbar. That’s done by adding the full path of the website to the Path field, and selecting an Icon for that website afterwards. Tip, if you cannot find an item select the favicon of the website.

The program is only compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. A download is available at the Door 2 Windows website.

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.

Placing drive shortcuts on the taskbar speeds up the process of accessing those drives. The standard options to open drives in Windows Explorer are to either double-click the computer icon and then the drive or to click the Windows Explorer icon and then the drive. Both operations require more clicks than the taskbar solution.

Here is what you need to do to place drive icons in the windows 7 Taskbar.

Right-click the computer desktop and select New > Text Document. Rename the document to Drive-X.exe. Make sure the extension is changed to exe. Replace X with the drive letter.

Now drag the new file to the Windows Taskbar and delete the file on the desktop afterwards. Right-click the icon on the Taskbar, move the mouse over the name, right-click on the name and selected properties.

drive link

Now edit both the target and start in fields so that they show only the drive path and no folders, for instance c:\ in both if a link to drive C should be placed in the taskbar.

drive windows 7 taskbar

You can optionally change the icon by clicking on change icon. That change however will only become active on the next logon, restart or if the explorer.exe process is restarted.

It is a good idea to select different icons for every drive that is added to the taskbar in Windows 7 to make the recognition easier.

That apparently is not the case as it is possible to disable the previews with a workaround as the Webtrickz blog points out.

All that needs to be done to disable tab previews in the Windows 7 taskbar is to run Google Chrome in Windows Vista Service Pack 2 compatibility mode. The taskbar preview feature is not available in Windows Vista and will therefor stop working.

To do this right-click the Google Chrome executable and select Properties from the context menu. Now switch to the Compatibility tab and check the “Run this program in compatibility mode for” option and select Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) from the list of available options.

A click on OK will apply the changes and disable the taskbar previews in Windows 7. Google Chrome will still show the active tab if the user moves the mouse over the taskbar icon but that is the default behavior and cannot be changed. (via Webtrickz)

That’s an interesting preview feature which comes in handy whenever there is no other way of finding out which window contains the information that need to be accessed. A practical example would be multiple Windows Explorer windows that are open. To access a specific one the user would need to click on them until the target was found. Windows 7 makes the selection process easier thanks to the preview thumbnails.

The information that are displayed cannot be customized in Windows 7, at least not in the Control Panel or by looking at the properties of the taskbar.

The Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Customizer program changes that. It can be used to change several parameters of the taskbar thumbnail in Windows 7 including the minimum and maximum size, spacing, delay time and margins.

Sliders next to each parameter can be used to change the values. It is for instance possible to increase the thumbnail size from the standard value of 200 pixels to a maximum of 512 pixels.

The parameters are self-explanatory and the Restore Defaults button ensures that the default values can be restored if needed.

The portable software program can be downloaded from The Windows Club website.

And there is indeed a way to add files and folders to the Windows 7 taskbar just like executable programs. The process is a little bit more complicated but it works just fine. Just follow the steps below to pin as many folders or files to the taskbar as you want.

Create a new text document and rename its file extension so that it becomes an executable file, e.g. downloads.exe. Drag and drop the program to the Windows 7 Taskbar so that it is pinned to it.

You can skip the next step if you know the path of the file or folder. If you do not know it you need to find it out first. Open Windows Explorer and locate the folder or file that you want pinned on the taskbar. Hold down the shift key and right-click the file or folder. Select Copy as path from the menu. This copies the path to the Windows Clipboard.

Now right-click the new icon in the Windows 7 taskbar and right-click its name again that is showing up after the first right-click. Select properties from the menu. You should be in the Shortcut tab of the window that opened.

Paste the clipboard contents into the Target field to replace the original file path with the desired one. It is now possible to change the icon of the file or folder by clicking on the Change Icon button in the same menu.

A click on OK finalizes the process and the file or folder can from then on be opened by left-clicking the icon in the Windows 7 taskbar. This step can be repeated if more than one file or folder need to be pinned to the taskbar. The original file that was used to pin the icon to the taskbar can be deleted afterwards.

Another feature that is missing is the ability to create custom jumplists. Jumplist Launcher is a free third party application that provides the means to create custom jumplists that act as a program and folder launcher in Windows 7.

The portable application will display an icon in the Windows 7 taskbar upon execution. The main interface can be used to configure the jumplist that is displayed when right-clicking the program’s icon. It is possible to add groups and in those groups files and folders.

Programs can be started with startup parameters. Other customizations include the program’s icon that can be changed and the order of the items that are displayed.

The amount of jumplist items can be changed and the jumplist can be changed into a tasklist which does not make use of categories.

Pinning the program to the taskbar makes it even possible to access those folders and programs without the program itself being open at all making it a very resource friendly program launcher.

Jumplist Launcher can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is only compatible with the Windows 7 operating system (via Tech Yard)

The free software program Windows 7 Taskbar Tweaker is a portable application for the Windows 7 operating system. It can be used to modify several of the default options of the Windows 7 taskbar to speed up Windows 7, to be precise:

• Right-click on a taskbar item to either display jumplists (default) or the standard window menu
• Change grouping from grouping applications to not grouping them
• Change dropping items to the taskbar from pinning them to opening them
• Change the middle-click behavior from opening a new program instance to either closing the window or focusing the window
• Change left-click on grouped item button from opening the thumbnail preview to cycling through the windows.
• Disable the thumbnail preview

The new settings become available after clicking on the apply button in the program window. The software program is available for download at the developer’s website for both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows 7 operating system.

Windows 7 Taskbar Iconizer is a implementation of that feature for Windows XP. It basically changes the way the folders and programs are displayed in the Windows Taskbar from their default view to a view where only icons are displayed. The program does that only on vertical taskbars. If you have customized the position of the Windows Taskbar to be on the left or right side of the desktop then you will not see a difference.

The only real gain is that additional folders and programs fit into the taskbar. Items are automatically grouped which adds even more space to the Taskbar.

The software program is portable and a restart is required after making the changes. The same program has to be used to revert the changes again.