Windows® 7 All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter III.2. Organizing Your Interface

In This Chapter

• Taming the super Taskbar

• Harnessing the power of the Start menu

• Getting at your most recently used documents quickly

• Starting your favorite programs with just a click

• Making workhorse programs start automatically

Windows 7 contains an enormous variety of self-help tools that can make your working (and playing!) days go faster. As you become more comfortable with the Windows inner world, you find shortcuts and simplifications that really do make a difference.

This chapter shows you how to take off the training wheels.

Tricking Out the Taskbar

Microsoft developers working on the Windows 7 taskbar gave it a secret internal project name: the Superbar. Although one might debate how much of the Super in the bar arrived compliments of Mac OS, there's no doubt that the Windows 7 taskbar runs rings around its predecessors.

The Windows 7 Super, uh, taskbar, appears at the bottom of the screen, as in Figure 2-1.

If you hover your mouse over an icon and the icon is associated with a program that's running, you see thumbnails of all the copies of the program. For example, in Figure 2-1, three different instances of Firefox are running, each sitting at a different Web site. Hover your mouse over the Firefox icons and you can see which sites are up for grabs. Slide your mouse over a thumbnail and click once, and Firefox appears with a site loaded and ready for bear.

Figure III.2.1. The taskbar juggles many different tasks.

Anatomy of the taskbar

The Taskbar ...