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Exile Programs to the System Tray
All active programs show up as icons on the Taskbar, whether you want them to or not. While this is useful for web browsing or word processing, your taskbar can get cluttered with icons you would normally expect to be hidden away, like those for Steam or a chat client. You can, however, keep active instances of these programs hidden away in the System Tray/Notification Area by right-clicking their shortcuts, navigating to the Compatibility tab, and selecting Windows Vista under the Compatibility Mode drop-down menu. Just be aware that this only works for programs that would previously hide away from the Taskbar in Vista.
Manage Your Jump Lists
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The Jump List, a list of shortcuts to files or tasks for a particular Start Menu or Taskbar item, is one of the most significant improvements in Windows 7. Each time you open a file or website, or run a task with a program that supports Jump Lists, Windows 7 stores the shortcut to the file, website, or task for reuse. Unlike Windows XP, however, Windows 7 doesn’t group these shortcuts into a single location. Instead, it stores shortcuts for each program’s files, websites, or tasks in a separate shortcut list—aka the Jump List. To see the Jump List for a program in the Start Menu, simply click the right-arrow icon. To see the Jump List for a program icon on the Taskbar, right-click the icon. Windows eventually removes items from the Jump List when it runs out of space, but you can override this. To make any Jump List item a permanent entry, highlight it and click the pushpin icon (reverse this process to unpin it). And if the idea of leaving an icon trail of all your recent history disturbs you, you can disable Jump Lists entirely: Right-click the Start Menu, choose Properties, and uncheck the two boxes under Privacy.
Organize Your Taskbar and System Tray
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The programs that you pin to your Taskbar can be moved around to any order you want, whether they’re just shortcut icons or currently active applications. The Taskbar, if unlocked, can also be dragged to latch to the left, right, or even top of your desktop. As shown below, Windows 7 improves side-docked Taskbar support with better gradient rendering and shortcut support. It really works well if you’re using a widescreen monitor. Just as the Taskbar icons can be rearranged at will, the icons in the System Tray (actually called the Notification Area) can be dragged and set to any order, as well. Hidden Icons can be dragged back into view, and you can hide icons by dragging them over the white triangle, and dropping them into the Hidden Icon well—much easier than working through the Notification Area Customization menu.
Accelerate Your Start Menu
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The Start Menu hasn’t changed much from Vista, but there are some notable improvements. The behavior of the power button has been changed to Shut Down, as opposed to Hibernate, which was the asinine default in Vista. But you can also change the button default to do other actions. Right-click the Start Menu, and choose Properties. From the Power Button Action drop-down, you can choose a new default button behavior. If you hit the Customize button, you’ll enter a world of opportunities that help you control what the Start Menu displays. Most options are turned off, but you may want some on, like the option to display recorded TV files, a feature that’s new in Windows 7. Also be aware that Start Menu items should be set to “Display as a link” if you want them to open up Jump Lists.
Arrange Files by Type, Month, Artist, and Other Options
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Windows Vista introduced the concept of using the Details folder view to group files by criteria such as name, date modified, type, size, and other options. These choices are still available in any folder by right-clicking inside the folder and selecting them from the options menu. But Window 7 does Vista one better with its new Libraries scheme, which enables you to view the contents of multiple file locations in a single logical folder. And as you’d expect, each Library comes correct with contextual file-arrangement options that vary according to what’s being viewed. For example, in the Pictures library, you can choose from Day, Rating, Tag, and Month. For videos, maybe arranging by Length, as in our screenshot, is most relevant. You get the point.
Pin Folders to Favorites and Start Menu
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Explorer’s Jump List shows your seven most frequently visited folders, but you can manually bookmark some favorites to the top of the list by pinning folder locations. Just right-click any folder—either on your desktop or from an open instance of Explorer—and drag that folder icon to the Explorer shortcut on the Taskbar. You’ll see a message that reads “Pin to Windows Explorer” before you release the mouse button. The folder will appear under a Pinned section of the Jump List, and you can remove it by clicking the “Unpin from this list” icon on the right side of the panel. You can also right-click and drag a folder directly to the Start button to pin that folder to the general Start list.
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