Through the looking glass. Or, How I Adapted to Windows 7

My laptop died. Boo hoo. IT gave me a brand new solid state drive. Yay! And they also gave me Windows 7 to go along with it. What a favor! No not really. I'm sitting here installing all the programs I need to be productive.

And learning to navigate around the quirks of Windows 7.

I have Vista at home and I had initially though that W7 would be fairly similar to Vista. Nope, there are some radical differences. The first one to hit me has been the Taskbar. Gone are the QuickLaunch menu and the familiar (sensible?) application window notifiers. The latter have been a mainstay of windows since the days of Windows 95! Instead, we have the unfamiliar (unfriendly?) Mac like "pin-up" blobs that you can "pin" to the task bar.

My initial thought was: "oh that's different. But it's cool... I can have an active QuickLaunch bar. Weird, but I can live with that."

But very soon, I found out that you can't pin too many things to the taskbar.

But you can create your own tool bar and use that for creating a QuickLaunch bar!
Microsoft kb article 975784