Windows Taskbar

It can happen that you quickly need open more than one window of the same application. It can be any application: a Windows application such as Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer, or a third-party application like Mozilla Firefox. Opening multiple windows is the same as running multiple instances of the same application. Let’s see how this is done.

Lately we have been receiving questions about how to pin shortcuts to applications which include custom command line parameters. People want to start their favorite programs (Firefox, Foobar, Internet Explorer, etc) using custom parameters which make them run in specific ways. This guide will show how simple it is to create and pin shortcuts, which include command line arguments, to the taskbar or the Start Menu.

You might have heard about this new feature of Internet Explorer 9 - pinned websites. Apparently you can pin websites on your taskbar and on your Start Menu. But what this feature really is? How does it work and is it really useful in real life? This complete guide aims to answer these questions and also provide information you will find nowhere else on the Internet.

Windows 7 comes with a convenient way to help you review the state of your system and find solutions to security and maintenance issues. The feature which facilitates this is called Action Center and it is built upon the foundation set by the Windows Security Center, which was first introduced by Windows XP Service Pack 2 and then tweaked by Windows Vista. In this article I will explain all the functionality of the Action Center and show how to configure it so that you receive only the notifications you desire.

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 versions 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.