Although the notification area has been around since Windows 95, it wasn't very customizable and useful until Windows 7 was launched. Even though many know what it is and what it does (or at least in theory), few know how customizable it has become. In Windows 7 and Windows 8 you can change every aspect of its functioning and make it look and behave the way you want to. Here's how:

We were asked to provide a simple solution to the problem of removing obsolete notification icons (i.e. icons for programs that are no longer installed) from the notification area on the Windows taskbar. While you can do this with dedicated software tools, a simple trick is to remove two registry values and then restart the explorer.exe process. Doing this will basically reset the icons cache for the notification area and keep only those icons used by active applications. Since editing the registry is a rather complex task, we decided to provide a simple tool to assist all our readers.

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.

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.

After we wrote about how to pin any folder to the taskbar, I decided to search the Internet for a way to make custom Jump Lists. Fortunately I managed to find an application that can do this, called Jumplist-Launcher. This is a free tool, created by Ali Dunnpfiff, which can be pinned down on your taskbar and allows you to create a custom Jump List for it. In this tutorial I will show you how to install JumpList Launcher, how to add an item, folder or group and how to modify your custom jump list.

Since we started writing about it, we said that the new taskbar is one of the best features in Windows 7. It has some very interesting new features & improvements which definitely boost user productivity compared to older versions of Windows. Therefore it is only natural for us to continue our series of articles about it. In this article, I'll show how to further customize different aspects of the taskbar such as: its appearance, size, location and toolbars.

In one of our previous articles we explained how to pin down to the taskbar a generic folder. In this article, I will show how to pin to the taskbar special Windows folders like Libraries, Computer, Network or even specific items from Control Panel or Administrative Tools.

Shortly after we published our article about the Windows 7 taskbar, one of our readers asked us for a way to pin a folder to the taskbar. After a bit of research I found a way to accomplish this task. Therefore, in this article, I am going to show how to pin any folder to the taskbar and how to change its default icon.

Windows 7 has introduced a major redesign of the taskbar which packs a lot of improvements. The list includes features such as Aero Peek, overlay icons and progress bars, jump lists, pinned items and so on. In this article I will provide you a complete overview of the new features and changes introduced by Windows 7. I will start with the most visible changes compared to Windows XP and then I will introduce all the new features.