Pin / move items to the taskbar

Remember, the Windows 7 taskbar doesn’t just contain buttons for running applications and other open windows. In this Windows version, the taskbar can also contain pinned shortcuts for applications, folders, documents, and other items. As shown in Figure, different types of taskbar buttons look different.

The Explorer button represents a pinned taskbar shortcut, and because no Explorer windows are open, its button appears to float on the taskbar, without any border. The Windows Media Player button, however, has a single rectangular border around it. This means that the Media Player application is active and running. And the Internet Explorer button has a bigger, more 3D border, indicating that multiple IE windows and/or tabs are open.

By default, Windows 7 pins three buttons to the taskbar for you: IE, Explorer, and Windows Media Player. But you can pin your own items to the taskbar, and you can unpin the default buttons if you don’t want them there.

There are a few ways to pin an item to the taskbar. The most obvious is to open the Start menu’s MRU or All Programs list, navigate to the shortcut you want, right-click it, and choose Pin to Taskbar from the pop-up menu that appears, as shown in Figure.

If you pin an item from the Start menu MRU to the taskbar, it will no longer appear in the Start menu . So if you’d like to also pin this item to the Start menu, you have dig deeper into the Start menu’s All Programs list to find it.

You can also drag and drop items onto the taskbar to pin them. As shown in Figure, the system will alert you that dropping the item will cause it to be pinned.