Miss the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7 ?

My wife was just commenting to me this morning that she needs some veteran help with Windows 7.  I already know some of what she’s going to ask me.  She’s going to ask me about desktop real estate, and the precious real estate on the Windows 7 taskbar.

This is primarily because she is using a 14” screen instead of a 15.4” screen now.  She is also running 1440x900 as opposed to 1680x1050 or 1920x1200.  To make matters worse, she also cranked up the DPI setting to 125%.  The net result is that she is having a little bit of a hard time coping with the taskbar, determining which email or website to select, etc.  A task preview doesn’t always cut it when juggling email and I don’t think she’s effectively using Aero Peek for tasks.  In fact, I rarely see anyone that is, even at Microsoft.

Coincidentally I stumbled across the article, “Restore the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7” by Bill Detwiler. Nicely written with good screenshots. I decided to experiment some so that I could compare and contrast the effectiveness.  

Here’s my resulting desktop. Click the pic for the full sized image.

There are a couple of interesting aspects when implementing a Quick Launch toolbar.  First, you’ll notice I have moved the QL bar to the far left and turned off text and titles.  Second, you’ll notice I have locked the taskbar and covered part of the QL bar.  This is indicated by the >> symbol.  Third, I set the taskbar buttons to “Never Combine” for the moment to highlight what some might consider a UI issue.

If you look closely at the Internet Explorer 8 thumbnails at the bottom of the pic, you can see I have two tabs opened in IE8, but there is no indication of that on the running task button.  That’s a bit odd and it was certainly introduced by turning on the QL toolbar.

And lastly, you can see that we get a new icon for each open email in Outlook.  I’m pretty sure this is what my wife wants, and will be her main complaint with her current Windows 7 settings. 

If you want the individual email message icons, you can get that affect without turning on the QL toolbar.  Just use the “Never Combine” taskbar setting.  It’s going to get unwieldy fast with the other Windows 7 defaults.  She is going to need to switch back to 100% DPI to make that work.

So I’ll show her the trade-offs most likely tomorrow and she what she prefers.  Should be interesting.