January 11th, 2010
9:52 am
Posted under Windows
Permalink
Tags Gotcha, Tip, Windows, Windows7
Some desktop shortcuts cannot be pinned to the new taskbar/superbar in Windows 7, for example a desktop shortcut to a url.
You can enable the old quick launch toolbar to do this as follows :-
On the taskbar, right click and pick Toolbars/new toolbar…
- In the Folder box at the bottom, paste in the following :-
%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
- Click Select Folder to save the change
- Note that the quick launch bar may end up to the right of the superbar. Dragging it to the left seems to be a fine art! I googled for a while and could not find out how to move it. In the end I discovered that the speed of dragging is very important here. It should be dragged by left clicking the dotted lines, or by left clicking just to the right of them so that the cross arrow appears. Click and hold and drag with a swift motion over the other bar, and drop, and this should work. If you are too slow with the drag it will not work and will just hit the adjacent bar. In my case, dragging the dotted lines seemed to work in either direction (i.e. can either drag superbar over quick launch or vice versa), but dragging with the crossed arrow only seemed to work rightwards. I did read a blog post that advocated unpinning everything from the superbar first, but this was not required, in the end it all comes down to the dragging technique. Once you have tried a few times and got it working it becomes second nature, but it is certainly very counter intuitive!
- You may also find that the quick launch bar disappears on reboot. You can re-add it back as in 1. above, and you should find that its contents are still there as previously. This post details how to modify the registry to remedy the disappearance problem, but this post on sevenforums states that you only need to make sure the that the current theme is saved (right click desktop, select personalize, right click and save the current theme). I’ve tried saving the theme and will see if it still disappears, and then try the registry mod.
This will also give access to the hidden 3-D Window Switcher that was in Windows Vista.
Full details of this may be found on here.
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