I have to be honest that I am a very traditional guy. If I am used to something that never breaks, I will continue using it until I get so familiar with it that I feel tough to make a change. One example is I still prefer to use my old laptop because it has Windows XP rather than my new and faster Acer laptop or Dell All-In-One desktop because they came with Windows 7 pre-installed. I know as a technology guy I have to keep up with upgrades so I slowly started to use Windows 7.

If you are familiar with Windows Vista, switching to 7 isn’t going to be much of a problem unlike from XP to 7 because so many things has changed! One of the changes which I am not used to is the missing Quick Launch in Windows 7. I normally keep my Quick Launch toolbar in XP very small with only 3 icons and they are Internet Explorer, Firefox and a Show Desktop icon to conveniently minimize all opened windows and programs.

Normally you can easily enable the Quick Launch by right clicking the taskbar, go to Toolbars and select Quick Launch but it’s not there in Windows 7. By default, Internet Explorer is already pinned and I thought I can just pin Firefox and Show Desktop icon and it’ll be done but somehow I just couldn’t pin Show Desktop. After messing around for an hour, I finally managed to pin IE, Firefox and Show Desktop icon together to taskbar but there is a problem where the pinned icons doesn’t look and behave the same as Quick Launch icons when either one of the pinned program is running.
Weird Quick Launch in Windows 7

After a lot of testing, I found out that there is no way to make the pinned programs to work like the Quick Launch icons. Then I figured I had to somehow create a Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7 and I managed to get it right.

1. First, I unpin all default programs from taskbar.

2. Unlock the taskbar by right clicking the taskbar and select “Lock the taskbar“.

3. Right click Taskbar, go to Toolbars and select New toolbar…

4. Simultaneously press Alt+D and type the following path below and then hit enter.

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\

5. Use the mouse to select the Quick Launch folder shown in the window and click the “Select Folder” button.

6. You should see Quick Launch word appear on the right side of the taskbar. Right click on it, go to View and select Large Icons. Then again right click on the Quick Launch word and uncheck both “Show Text” and “Show title” by clicking on them.
disable show text and show title

7. Now move your mouse cursor to the dotted lines that is next to the start menu button until it shows the two arrows pointing left and right.
Drag Quick Launch
Left click and hold, drag it right to the end past the Quick Launch toolbar and once you see that the Quick Launch icons ended up at the left corner of the taskbar, drag the dotted lines back to the left.

8. Right click on the taskbar and select “Lock the taskbar“.

Now I have a quick launch toolbar that works exactly the same as in Windows XP.
Windows 7 Quick Launch
If you didn’t know, you can use a shortcut key WIN+D to show desktop and CTRL+N to open new browser window for Firefox/IE. It clearly looks like Microsoft is trying to remove the quick launch toolbar in Windows 7 but luckily it is still possible to bring it back.

[tags]quick, launch, windows, toolbar, pin[/tags]