UTUNTU UTARI UZI KURI MACHINE

Show the Windows Desktop with a new shortcut

If you’re anything like us, once you’ve installed a new operating system or bought a new PC, you start out organizing files and documents with the best of intentions. But before long your Windows Desktop becomes your de facto filing cabinet, peppered with shortcuts, frequently used spreadsheets, random photos, and abandoned detritus. The easy way to access that debris field to find something—the Windows key + D combination, which minimizes all Windows for a clear view of the desktop—is a helper that most of us know.

Windows 7, though, lets you bring up the desktop without taking your hand off your mouse or pointing device—but it’s not obvious how until you stumble upon it. In the extreme lower right portion of the screen, at the far-right edge of the taskbar, you’ll see a little vertical rectangle with a “glossy” finish. Hover the mouse pointer over it, and the Windows Desktop appears, letting you inspect it. (You’ll still see ghostly outlines of the windows you have open.) Move the mouse off the rectangle, and your windows reappear. You can also activate this via a keyboard shortcut: Windows key + spacebar.

Click on the rectangle, though (as opposed to hovering), and you’ll minimize all windows, allowing you to interact with the desktop, open folders, and the like. If you don’t open or maximize any new windows manually, clicking the rectangle a second time restores the view to the state it was in before you clicked.

Miss your old taskbar buttons? Revert ’em

For the first few weeks we spent with Windows 7, we stumbled around the new default taskbar like we were lost in a corn maze. Don’t get us wrong—we like most of the changes to it. But the big graphical icons signifying programs, as opposed to the horizontal-tiles-with-text that we were used to from Windows XP and Vista, made us think twice every time we approached the taskbar region. Was the app launched, or merely pinned to the taskbar?
We’re sure we’ll get the hang of the new taskbar yet, but in the meantime, we poked around and discovered that you can revert things to the way they used to be. (That’s comforting, since that can be said of so few things in life.)
Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties. This launches the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box. (We’ll be coming back to this box more than a few times in this story.) On the Taskbar tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu called Taskbar buttons. We've circled it here:

Windows 7’s default installation has this menu set at Always combine, hide labels. Change the setting to Combine when taskbar is full or Never combine, as you see fit. (Never combine prevents the taskbar from grouping a given program’s multiple windows together when the taskbar gets crowded.) Voila: You’ll see the familiar taskbar buttons of old, replete with text labels.

Install Control Panel submenus in the Start menu

If you’re any kind of PC tweaker, like we are, you spend way too much time inside the Windows Control Panel. One of the quibbles we’ve had with past versions of Windows was the several layers of clicks you’d have to negotiate to get into the depths of Control Panel—especially with the Category as opposed to Classic view of the panel that was the default with Vista.
In Windows 7, you can set up the OS to allow you direct access to individual Control Panel items straight from the Start menu. To set this up, right-click the Start button in the taskbar, and choose Properties from the resulting context menu. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box that pops up, click the Start Menu tab, then the Customize button. Under the subcategory named Control Panel on the ensuing screen, choose Display as a menu. It's here:

Now, when you click Control Panel in the Start menu, you’ll get a selection list that shows all the same Control Panel sub-items that you’d get if you launched the Control Panel into its own window. It looks like this:

Launch Web pages straight from the task bar

If you’re an all-day Web user—constantly jumping online in the midst of other tasks—you probably do a frequent two-step you might call the IE Shuffle (substitute “Firefox,” “Opera,” or “Chrome,” if you’re so inclined): Find your open browser or its launch icon (perhaps buried behind open windows or sitting on the Windows Desktop somewhere), launch it or maximize it, and enter your destination address in the address bar.
Not exactly a terrible hardship, but Windows 7 can save you some steps by letting you install a miniature address bar right in the taskbar. When you type an address into it, it launches a browser window and goes directly to that site. Handy! It also works with the uber-useful browser shortcut domain-name-plus-Ctrl + Enter. So, for example, if you want to visit www.computershopper.com, you can type just computershopper in this mini-address bar, then press Ctrl + Enter. The browser will autofill the “www.” and the “.com,” just like it would in your main browser window.
The address-bar-in-the-taskbar isn’t active by default, though. To set it up, right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the now-familiar Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off Address, then hit OK. Here's the dialog box:

You’ll now see the miniature address bar in the taskbar. It looks like this:
 

Enter a Web address, and Windows 7 will launch a browser window, already headed to your Web destination. Of course, this is Microsoft here, so this works by default with Internet Explorer 8, assuming that IE8 is set as your default browser. If you want to use the taskbar address window with another browser, you’ll have to set that one as your default.

Access the Windows Desktop without minimizing anything

In the first tip, we showed you how to get to the Windows Desktop by hovering over or clicking on the new transparent zone in the lower-right corner of the screen—a.k.a., the Aero Peek feature. But perhaps you access your Windows Desktop constantly, or it contains lots of nested folders that are home to your everyday working files. You can get fast-click access to them from the taskbar without minimizing all your windows and losing your place.
You’ll have to set this up, though. Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off the Desktop button.

 

Hit OK, and a mini-menu called “Desktop” appears in the taskbar, followed by two angle brackets (>>). Click it, and you’ll see all of the items on your Windows Desktop, complete with nesting folders. Now it’s easy to access anything on your Windows Desktop without having to navigate back to it. Especially useful: The Computer entry in this menu lets you browse your PC’s entire drive-and-folder hierarchy from here (including any networked drives).