anyone actually like win 7 pinning feature

jcmuse

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 10, 2006
Messages
329
I personally just think it complicates things. I haven't really used the feature, but from what i've read it just adds the # of clicks you gotta make to reach the window you want.

The only time i'd see it useful is if i had a TON of windows of the same program open, like lets say 5+. Hopefully there is a way to set the threshold to where it goes into PIN mode.
 
I love it!
Feels new and fresh. I have xp on my laptop and its rough going back to it in class after playing around with the RC on my desktop.
 
You don't even need to click, you can just hover over, you know.

I find it incredibly useful to find where I'm going and to provide a constant place. Whenever I need IE, it's always in the exact same space on the toolbar regardless of whether it's open or multiple copies are open or whatever.
 
You don't even need to click, you can just hover over, you know.

I find it incredibly useful to find where I'm going and to provide a constant place. Whenever I need IE, it's always in the exact same space on the toolbar regardless of whether it's open or multiple copies are open or whatever.

I am also starting to like it. I love how the icon in the bar changes to show multiple windows. It's a neat effect. So neat, my wife wants RC now for her laptop.
 
I think it's very pretty but not very useful. I've actually stopped using the taskbar entirely since I found Switcher.
 
It's pretty, but I prefer the usability of the standard taskbar. Perhaps once more apps start taking advantage of the new toolbar API it'll become more useful.
 
Once I started using it instead of trying to find a replacement for the quick launch, its actually very helpful. My favorite feature is say you pin the remote desktop connection to it, all my remote desktop connections I use show up when you click the arrow next to it, very helpful!

What I would like to know is how do I get rid of the Sticky Notes bar from the task bar...
 
I think he wants the sticky notes to function more like a gadget and not have an instance running in the taskbar. I actually was hoping for the same thing. Really it's an aesthetic thing, but it just keeps the taskbar cleaner.
 
The what?

I think he wants the sticky notes to function more like a gadget and not have an instance running in the taskbar. I actually was hoping for the same thing. Really it's an aesthetic thing, but it just keeps the taskbar cleaner.

That is correct. Its actually pretty annoying. I use the sticky notes feature in Ubuntu all the time and wish that it functioned that way as well.
 
Not really.

I changed it to the old fashioned quick-launch setup.

Having 'running' programs all along the bottom with 'non-running' programs mixed all in there just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

I want all my 'running' icons in ONE place.
 
Quick Launch is still there.

Create a new toolbar, browse to the Quick Launch folder, and voila! Position it back to the left and configure as needed.

Once I started using it instead of trying to find a replacement for the quick launch, its actually very helpful. My favorite feature is say you pin the remote desktop connection to it, all my remote desktop connections I use show up when you click the arrow next to it, very helpful!

What I would like to know is how do I get rid of the Sticky Notes bar from the task bar...
 
Not really.

Having 'running' programs all along the bottom with 'non-running' programs mixed all in there just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

I feel the same way. I'm all for customization, I'm just having a hard time getting used to it.
 
Quick Launch is still there.

Create a new toolbar, browse to the Quick Launch folder, and voila! Position it back to the left and configure as needed.

Sweet. Thank you!

For those trying to find the Quick Launch folder:
\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

Took some effort to get the quick launch to the left of the smart bar stuff, but it's working just like I'm used to. This makes me happy.
 
Are we talking about the start menu pinning or the task bar pinning?

I was talking about the start menu pinning.
 
I like having separate jump lists for each pinned app - it's much faster and more convenient, and reduces the # of clicks needed to do anything. It's one of the things that most of my users would love to have.

The two drawbacks I have seen so far are not being able to have separate icons for multiple instances of pinned items, and the fact that ShellRunAs doesn't work on pinned shortcuts, but overall it's been far better than the old taskbar/quick launch combo.
 
it doesn't increase the # of clicks at all. you pin it or drag it to your taskbar and now you are only one click away from your item...
 
There are a couple things that really annoy me about it. 1 is that when you click on the icon it pops up that menu if theres more than one window open... why? Thats what hover is for, when I click on it I want the damn thing to come to the front right away. This probably was the result of a meeting where someone said "its not obvious enough that you can just hover over it, some people might try clicking it", theres always at least one in every group that has to treat the customer like theyre completely brain dead and incapable of basic human learning.

Another thing is with IE, when you close IE but still have the download window open you cant open a new browser window by clicking on the taskbar icon, you have to right click it and choose the ie.exe link in the menu. It makes me wonder how people that arent very computer savy will be able to figure out how to open a new IE window with the download window still open since I doubt theyll think of right clicking and then clicking on the same IE icon that isnt doing what they want.

If they fixed those 2 things then I think it would be perfect.
 
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Another thing is with IE, when you close IE but still have the download window open you cant open a new browser window by clicking on the taskbar icon, you have to right click it and choose the ie.exe link in the menu. It makes me wonder how people that arent very computer savy will be able to figure out how to open a new IE window with the download window still open since I doubt theyll think of right clicking and then clicking on the same IE icon that isnt doing what they want.
Or they could treat it like IE and Middle Click or Shift+Click.
 
Nope. I only pin Firefox to the task bar, everything else I just keep in the start menu. Much cleaner.
 
I never really like/used quicklaunch anyway, so pinning things to the taskbar is not something I really like. Plus, that type of window grouping (where you never see the name of the windows, as opposed to the other/old option of just grouping when there are too many windows) makes it too easy to lose track of what windows are open or not.

perhaps I'm just old fashioned...
 
pinning things to the taskbar is one huge time saver. having used win7 in a work enviroment we found it to be alot easier to pin often used items (cmd prompt, outlook excel and other such apps) since we always had multiple full screen windows open we rarely used desktop icons.
 
pinning things to the taskbar is one huge time saver. having used win7 in a work enviroment we found it to be alot easier to pin often used items (cmd prompt, outlook excel and other such apps) since we always had multiple full screen windows open we rarely used desktop icons.

What you're describing sounds like the quick launch.


One of the ways that it annoys me is that I used to have a quick launch icon for reaching my shares on my WHS. When I pin the Shares on Server shortcut to the super bar now it folds it into the explorer button, requiring me to first click on the explorer button and then find the Shares on Server button and click on it. So that's kind of frustrating.

Thanks for the heads up on restoring quick launch. As i see the value of both the quick launch and the superbar. It's nice to be able to have both.
 
I really like it. I wasn't sure at first because of being used to having an active program tab open up, but now I have become very fond of it.
 
One thing I'd like to see on the taskbar. Is maybe when you launch an app. It moves it with the other opened apps. What happens is after a while you got opened apps and icons scattered all over the place. So it becomes a little hard to find the icon to click.

So if they changed it then all closed app icons would be to the left and opened apps aligned to the right.
 
Not really.

I changed it to the old fashioned quick-launch setup.

Having 'running' programs all along the bottom with 'non-running' programs mixed all in there just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

I want all my 'running' icons in ONE place.

I felt the same way, but after a bit, it became second nature - I went from Vista 32 to W7 64 since I have 6 gigs of ram. For IE, it feels like IE is always running - even though I know it isn't, thats how fast it starts for me. I honestly can't tell the diff between clicking an already instance of IE and a non running one in terms of how fast the window opens and I see stuff on the screen.

I also like how the progress bar of the active downloads changes the IE icon - the first time the icon started turning green I was going WTF? Then I realized what it was doing, and was like damn, that's a nice feature.
 
The files that make IE a lot of what it is, the executables and the dlls, are always loaded since it uses a great deal of code that Explorer itself uses. They're not one and the same, in others words IE isn't so tightly integrated anymore that you can't uninstall it (in Windows 7 for the first time), but even so... it does load faster on first run than any other browser I've tried on a huge variety of hardware. It's not my primary browser, however, Firefox is.

The Quick Launch should have been deprecated in Windows 7, that's my opinion and I'm stickin' to it. After setting up the Taskbar how I prefer it to be nowadays in Windows 7, I wouldn't dare even dream of enabling the Quick Launch ever again, and when I do run XP for whatever reason I swear, I miss the Windows 7 Taskbar quite a bit. :D

It does pretty much everything the old Quick Launch does/can do/did so I don't see what the issues are. One Taskbar is enough nowadays... it's a brilliant piece of engineering.
 
Quick launch should be gone, vanished into thin air.
It makes no sense to want a separate bar of icons for apps, which leads to an icon for an app on top of the icon on the taskbar for the running instance of the app.
Instead, one icon, always in the same place on the taskbar. win
 
I do like it a lot. I like how it groups IE and exporer windows because I always end up with a ton of open windows/tabs. I find it actually makes it quicker to find what I am looking for.

Then again, alt tab has been improved quite a bit too and I use that when I only have a few windows open but when I am busy working away and get a number of windows open, alt tab kinda breaks down and finding it on the task bar in wone easy place is great.
 
I used to have a Quick Launch with 20+ items back in the XP days. Once I got over the initial "crap, wheres my stuff" feeling, I'm glad its gone.

The more I use 7, the more I find myself pinning things to the Start menu instead. I only keep Firefox and Explorer pinned to the Taskbar, but for them the Windows+1, Windows+2, etc key combos are really handy. I still use XP with Quick Launch at work, and find myself doing all the new Windows 7 shortcuts out of habit.
 
I find it much simpler.

All of my icons stay in the same spot. I don't have to go to a separate place to open a program that isn't running. I don't even use the start menu anymore.. everything I use most frequently is right there on the taskbar.

I don't even use desktop shortcuts anymore because I don't need them.
 
What I was talking about. Is opened icons take more space. Pushing everything else to the right. So if you have 4 apps opened, some of your icons won't be in the same spot. Which is why I suggested opened icons should shift right.

But the new taskbar is better than the old though.
 
It's new and cool.... what else can I say?? Some people will like it and some people will hate it.
 
What I was talking about. Is opened icons take more space. Pushing everything else to the right. So if you have 4 apps opened, some of your icons won't be in the same spot. Which is why I suggested opened icons should shift right.

But the new taskbar is better than the old though.

This only happens when you have "combine when full" turned on.. if you leave it on the default where it groups underneath the icons, it isn't an issue.

After getting accustomed to the hidden labels and icon representations, seeing text labels and old-style taskbar buttons looks really weird to me :p
 
I don't even use desktop shortcuts anymore because I don't need them.

I am slowly moving towards this.

In XP I use to have 3-4 columns of icons. Now on Vista x64 it has cut down to 1/3rd that. My desktop now consists of mostly folder shortcuts and bunch of text files for organization. For uncommon apps, I just use the quick search thing in the start menu. For my game related things I use StarDock (IE: ventrilo, hamachi etc.)

I need to start using Outlook more for dates, reminders etc. as I have a habit of using text files. When I game in a lower res and go back to windows all my icons get screwed up too. :c(
 
Are we talking about the start menu pinning or the task bar pinning?
I was talking about the start menu pinning.
People still want to use the start menu? Programs launch from the taskbar or winkey->type, sleep is win->right-><enter>. Theres no other reason to touch the start menu. Ever.
 
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