Notes from the Help Desk…

One of the new “Mac-like” features of Windows 7 is your Taskbar customization options. The Mac shows your icons at the bottom of the screen. As you hover over an icon, it magnifies. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a difference between an open app and a closed one in terms of appearance.

Windows 7 provides a version of that. First, there is no Quick Launch toolbar. When you drag an icon to the Taskbar, it shows up where the open icons are. The difference is that the open icons have a box around them to let you know they are open. The Word icon in the example below shows that there are three files open. When you hover over the icon, you can see each file and select the one you want.

You can make the icons smaller, which I did initially. I went back to the larger size from a combination of aging eyes and better visuals on the icons.

You can customize the Taskbar and the Start Button as you did in XP and Vista: Right-click on the button and select Properties. You can keep this behavior (combine icons, hide text), turn it off when the taskbar is full, or never use it. Initially, I turned it off and went to small icons. But I find myself liking the new look.

And while we’re at it, the Desktop Preview box at the far end of the Taskbar is kind of cool—hover over it and it makes your windows transparent so you can see your desktop—but there is a slight hesitation before it happens that is annoying. Much faster to press Windows Logo Button + D to minimize everything and Windows-D to restore it. Both of these happen instantly.