Appearance and Personalization

Since Windows 7 was launched, our team is a big fan of the new taskbar and its features. Working with it seriously improves your productivity compared with all previous version of Windows. In this article we will continue to talk about it and share a roundup of tips & shortcuts which will further improve your productivity. You will learn things like: how to control the position of taskbar icons, preview contents of windows without opening them, use the keyboard to navigate between opened windows and many other tips.

We were asked to provide a simple solution to the problem of removing obsolete notification area icons (i.e. icons for programs that are no longer installed) which appear in the list icons for which you can change the notification area behavior. Apart from dedicated software solutions, a simple trick is to remove two registry values and then restart the explorer.exe process. Doing this will basically reset all your notification area icons and keep only your active ones. Since editing the registry is a task for advanced users, we decided to provide a simple tool to assist our readers.

We continue our series about the taskbar with a tutorial about the notification area. Although the notification area is present in the Windows graphical user interface since Windows 95, never before had it been so easy to customize as it is in Windows 7. This article shows you several tricks about configuring it and transforming it into something more appropriate to your needs. I will show: how to locate the notification area, control the display behavior of notification icons, turn on or off system icons, restore the default behavior of the notification area, set the notification icons to be always displayed, and change the position of individual notification icons.

I will continue our series about customizing the visual aspects of your Windows 7 with an article on how to customize your themes. Compared to previous versions of Windows, in Windows 7 you no longer have to hack your system to have it look the way you want to. Now you can easily customize lots of aspects such as: the desktop backgrounds used by a theme, the sound scheme, window color, transparency, screensaver, etc. Also, you can easily create your own themes, install new ones, without any technical knowledge of files that need to be hacked, etc.