Where is the Quick Launch Toolbar Folder Located?

I've talked before about how to customize one's Quick Launch folder in your Taskbar to keep your most used applications easily accessible. You now know that oftentimes you can just drag and drop icons into the Quick Launch toolbar, and reorder them as you want, and you can easily delete by right clicking on an icon. But do you know where the actual folder of icons that make up your Quick Launch Folder is located?

Using Windows Explorer, you can find your Quick Launch folder here:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

Ridiculous that it's in the Internet Explorer folder, further reminder of MS trying to shove IE down our necks.

I also just searched around and found this message board post that showed the order of Quick Launch icons in the registry, which is located here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Taskbar

The actual registry entry is really complicated and seems to require another program to decipher and edit. I don't recommend it myself, just drag and drop to change the order yourself!

XNeat Windows Manager Not Worth It (review)

I've run into XNeat Windows Manager here and there the past few months of scouring the internet for ways to improve my desktop experience, but could never get into it. Its featureset wasn't enough to make me excited to have it installed, it didn't do anything that completely blew me away, and its website lacked screenshots that showed me how its more abstract features worked.

For some reason I can't recall, I tried it yesterday night, and found it, simply, a nightmare to use. What the website never really describes is that what it essentially does as a program is add a couple of right and middle click menu choices to your Taskbar and Active Titlebar, such as Make on Top, Transparency, and a bunch of others. It also adds options to drag and drop rearrage taskbar buttons, and add extra options to the Save As Dialogue. Not bad, for now.

When you launch the XNeat program itself, you get options menus for each of those things it changes. Except the interface of the option is completely unintuitive. With no introductory lesson on the program's functions, I had no idea what the options represented. Turns out it just lets you pick which of the menu options to pop up when you right or middle click on the Taskbar/Title bar.

Anyway, this wouldn't be terrible except for when I accidentally made my taskbar completely disappear by middle clicking on the taskbar and hitting "send to tray." I don't know why such an option would even exist, since it makes no sense. That's like saying "put garage inside car." And that's basically what happened; the taskbar disappeared with no way for me to access it at all. I had to mess around in the Taskbar and Start Menu option in the Control Panel before it reappeared.

It was such an overall unpleasant experience that I couldn't even enjoy the Save-as function, which lets you append dates and clone a document instead of overwriting it. It's such a novel and good option that it's a shame that it's packaged with other features that treat even an advanced user with such contempt. For something that's supposed to make my Windows experience more intuitive, it certainly has a long way to go to make itself user-friendly. Definitely uninstalled and not recommended.

Vertical Taskbar for a More Efficient Widescreen Desktop

When you have a widescreen display like I do (in my case, a 24 inch 1920x1200 widescreen LCD), you often find yourself with far more horizontal space than you do vertical space. This applies when you mainly use your computer for browsing and word processing (as opposed to watching movies and gaming). As such, I've become very sensitive towards tools that let me maximize the viewing experience.

One big change I did recently was switch to a vertical taskbar. Before, I had a normal horizontal taskbar as most of you do:



(My real taskbar is much wider than that image, I cropped it to be more viewable.)

(Check my post on why I decided to stick with the Windows taskbar versus an OSX-like Dock)

While I was perfectly happy with the layout I'd worked for the taskbar, I was still using up about 50 pixels on the bottom of the screen.

Finally, I decided to give a vertical taskbar a try. I'd tried this in the past but I was too impatient to get it to look any way acceptable to me, so I'd always switched back. Looking back on it now, I highly stress that making this switch will require quite a bit of customization for you to get it to look the way you want to, and will take even longer for you to get used to it.

So here's how to do it. First, right click on your taskbar and click "Lock this taskbar." This then allows you to drag the taskbar to the side of your screen. I personally chose to drag it to the left, because I have a 2nd monitor to the right of my primary display, and the start button faces to the right.

As you can see on the image to the right, I've then been able to add far more icons to the Quick-Launch (I decided to stick with shortcuts in the multiples of four, to make full rows). Click here to learn how to attach the Recycle Bin into the Quick Launch.

Below that, I have a toolbar set up for My Computer. To insert or create a custom toolbar, right click on the taskbar, then "Toolbars," and there you can click on My Computer, or select your own folder to create a new toolbar. As you can see, at the bottom of my taskbar I have a folder called "Desktop," where I can access files that go into my Desktop, without having to display the actual files on my desktop.

Here are some more notes on customizing your Taskbar. With the taskbar unlocked, you can drag the width of the taskbar to fit your needs. However, if you make it too narrow, the word "Start" in the start button can and will disappear if it's not wide enough to fit. Likewise, if it's too narrow, your taskbar items might be too short for you to read the name of the windows also.

If you want to change the vertical order of your various toolbars, first keep the Taskbar unlocked. Then, click and hold on the name of the toolbar (like click on the words "My Computer," or "Quick Launch," etc). Now here's where it gets tricky. If you just drag the mouse up and down, all it'll do is increase or decrease the toolbar's height, but not reorder it with other toolbars. Instead, drag your mouse to the side, where the toolbar will snap into a 2nd column on the right. From there, you can click and drag it back into the one column, this time in the place you want it to be. This process can be a headache sometimes, and this is where I insist you practice plenty of patience. It's going to be worth it.

Finally, if you right click on the Toolbar name again (with the taskbar unlocked), you have several other options, including increasing the icon size (making your taskbar look even more like a dock), showing the text of the icon, and showing the title of the Toolbar. Again, you have to play around with this stuff.

Here're some other specific reasons why I like a vertical taskbar.

1. First of all, I can fit 25 windows in the taskbar before it gets too cramped. Not that I've ever gotten close to having that many windows open, but it's good to have the option.
2. Secondly, I love having even more one-click access to my most important programs and folders. I can even see how much space is left in my hard drives by just hovering over their icons in the My Computer toolbar.
3. Thirdly, if you look at the system tray, you'll see that the clock now shows the clock, then the day of the week, then the full date. It's a small but appreciated addition.
4. And finally, I feel less like I'm wasting my desktop this way. Especially since I switched to a vertical Tabbar for Firefox, I feel like I've just got so much vertical space now to browse online, perfect for when reading long blog posts. It's even better when I've got my instant messaging buddy list dock to the side as well. I've got so much information at my disposal without it becoming too cluttered.

Have you made the switch yet?

Did Your Window Get Stuck Offscreen? Move it Back!

Getting a window stuck so far off screen that you can't even get a handle on its title bar to move it back into place can happen if you switch resolutions a lot, or use multiple monitors that have different resolutions. The latter just happened to me a few minutes ago. Here's the sure-fire way to get it back into view:

Just right click on the window's button on the taskbar, and click "Move." Now here's the kicker: take your hand off the mouse, and use the ARROW keys to nudge it back into view. Your mouse doesn't work all the time because technically your mouse can't move outside of the monitor's field of view (hence it won't reach something outside)

Of course this method works best if you know where your window had flung off to. If it went off on the left side and you think it went off to the right, you may well have just pushed it further into oblivion. Beware!

Mobdydock Wouldn't Work at All

I'm pretty sure I checked out Mobydock already (yep, I did) in the past, but I saw some new screenshots of it that seemed to turn my mind. The description on the official site claims that it can serve as a total taskbar replacement (honestly I can't remember if I read the same stuff when I checked them out the first time), but nevertheless I was intrigued enough to check it out again.

Well, turns out now Mobydock wouldn't show up for me at all when I ran it after installation, and I couldn't figure out why. I restarted my computer and closed most of my active windows and still no dice. If anyone can tell me for certain what's going on and how to fix it, I'm willing to give Mobydock yet one more shot, but for now, I still maintain that the Windows Taskbar is better than a Dock.

Another Dock Review: JetToolBar (Verdict: No Thanks)

A comment on a recent post on MakeUseOf that talked about cleaning up one's desktop pointed me to JetToolBar, developed by COWON America, best known for making digital audio players. I haven't figured out yet how that and object docks/toolbars intersect, but I don't fault them.

From the official site, here's what JetToolBar offers:

Despite Microsoft's best intentions, the Start Menu isn't everybody's cup of tea. If you're looking for an alternative way to launch your programs, take a look at jetToolBar. During installation this well-done utility creates 14 default categories, registers shortcuts for many of your applications, and adds bookmarks for recommended Web pages.

jetToolBar is a simple and easy-to-use program launcher. When you install jetToolBar, it creates 14 default categories, registers shortcuts for your application programs, bookmarks of the best recommended Internet Homepages.

You can position the toolbar on any edge of the screen of any monitor in a docked state, or in a floating state as a normal window. In either state, you can change the size of the toolbar and the program launch buttons to various button sizes.

You can optionally show or hide the categories, and an auto-hide feature is included for optional use in the docked state. If you set hotkey, you can see "ToolBar Menu" anywhere of the screen with the hotkey.

Drag buttons to where you want them. Intuitive right-click menus let you easily access appearance and behavior options.

Category : Control Panel, Desktop, Multimedia, Word, Games, Graphics, Utility, Internet, Book Mark ( News, Sports, Entertainment, Computer News, Download, Search )

My thoughts? Well, the guy who led me to this commented that it was the only dock/toolbar he used after trying all the different ones. I tried it for about 10 minutes and realized that I and that other guy could not possibly have more differing tastes in what makes a good Taskbar alternative.

First of all, JetToolbar is skinned like it's for Windows 98. It is butt ugly, and the complete polar opposite of Object and RocketDock. It isn't compatible with Windows themes, so it did not match my Zune theme at all.

It does offer an always-on view of all your application shortcuts, and you can customize what goes on there, so if you're the kind of person that needs to have 30 different applications available to you at your fingertips, then I guess that's good for you. I prefer keeping my less-than-10 most-used applications in the Quick Launch bar (along with the Recycling Bin).

And finally, the clincher (though even if it had this feature I'd probably still think it was too ugly to use), it did not offer support for taskbar window access and the system tray. Clearly this toolbar isn't meant to replace the Windows taskbar, just supplement it... but what a waste of vertical space to have this thing around at all times. I could just increase the number of rows the task bar occupies and add more icons to the Quick Launch.

That being said, the product IS freeware and does just what it advertises, so I can't fault it too much, especially since it's developed by a company not really known for productivity software. For me, however, I'm still sticking to my good-old-taskbar.

Taskbar versus Dock

A few months ago I asked a coworker who had recently become a Mac fanboy to try to convince me on using a Mac OSX-like Dock instead of using the Windows Taskbar, other than aesthetics. He said something about "application-based" versus "document-based," but it all sounded like he was quoting some blog article. So I checked some blogs, and got a better idea of what the hell he was talking about.

I decided to stick with the Taskbar (with the shiny Zune desktop theme, of course). It took up less desktop space and memory, and most importantly I hated how on the OSX dock, you couldn't see all of the open application windows accessible without cycling through them, or be minimized first. And there wasn't much of a difference from launching applications in the dock versus having them in the Windows quick start toolbar.

A few days ago, two months after that initial conversation, I decided to check out the two most popular options for a Windows dock myself: Objectdock (by Stardock, free or 20 dollars for the plus version), and Rocketdock (Punk Labs, freeware).

I tried Objectdock first, and was first impressed by its look (it looks a lot like the OSX dock, regardless of which of the included skins you used. Nothing wrong with that), and secondly at how small its memory footprint was. All of the options you had in the OSX dock were present (being able to drag/drop stuff into it, move them around, etc), plus quite a bit more (I do have to admit, the options windows weren't intuitively labeled, and I didn't have the easiest time with figuring out what the different options actually did.

It also docked vertically on the sides of the screen far better than any configuration of the windows taskbar.

I was pleased to learn that Objectdock also had the taskbar option of having all the windows represented on the right side of the dock (the same place OSX windows would go if you minimized them), and it worked just as I assumed. I was almost ready to throw out my Windows taskbar altogether. Except for one thing.

The free version of Objectdock did not have support for the system tray icons (the icons on the far right of the taskbar where the clock is). OSX doesn't have a system tray (at least not in the dock... I guess that thing on the upper right is its system tray), so I guess in trying to mimic OSX native support for that was unfortunately overlooked (despite the existence of taskbar support). Objectdock's premium version apparently does support the system tray, but apparently at the expense of taskbar functionality. I refused to pay a premium for something that can only do two of the three things I take for granted now at any given time.

Disappointed but not altogether surprised, I moved onto RocketDock, only to find it doesn't have any support for system tray icons at all (how can you dock people survive without it???)

I also tried other programs like Y'ZDock (I dunno where that name comes from), and checked out RK Launcher and Mobydock, and they all seemed to have the same limitations.

As such, I've decided to stick with my very tweaked, customized, shiny old taskbar:

Soon I'll highlight exactly what tweaks I did to make it look like that!