Microsoft Windows XP Power Toolkit

As explained in the Introduction, this book is organized into three parts: Part I, “Microsoft Power Tools in the Box”; Part II, “Microsoft Power Tools Out of the Box”; and Part III, “Third-Party Power Tools.” This chapter, the first of Part I, pertains to tools that you use more frequently than others, yet probably don’t regard as tools: the Start menu, the desktop, and the taskbar. Most users launch programs from either the Start menu or the desktop and let the taskbar take care of itself. This chapter shows you how to use the taskbar as the main control center for running Microsoft Windows XP and all your applications.

If you could inspect the millions of computers on which Windows XP is installed, you would probably find that no two computers have precisely the same user interface. As soon as you begin to use Windows XP, the software begins to adapt to your preferences. You can personalize Windows even more by manually customizing the taskbar so that it performs like a power tool that will consistently yield faster access to the programs and utilities that you use most often.

The Windows user interface has undergone continual refinement. The most notable improvement was implementing the desktop metaphor in Microsoft Windows 95. Windows XP now has a fresh look, with a new 3-D icon style and a new layout for the Start menu. Nevertheless, for power users, Windows XP’s improvements might sometimes reduce efficiency by requiring more clicks than would seem necessary. The first part of this chapter examines several adjustments that you can make to the standard Windows XP layout that produce a very clean, yet fully featured, user interface. Our custom power-user Windows XP interface uses the taskbar as a control center—what we’ll call a power taskbar—that enables you to launch any program and access any desktop icon or open program with the fewest clicks possible.

Longtime PC users will tell you that the fastest, most efficient way to execute any software command is by using a keyboard shortcut—Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste, and so on. The keyboard shortcuts that employ the Windows logo key (), which are listed later in this chapter, demonstrate the efficacy of this advice. Although we advise you to learn and use keyboard shortcuts when you can, we do not advocate that every power user memorize and use all the available keyboard shortcuts.

We start with the premise that an effective software user interface does the following two things well:

1. Provides quick and easy access to the software features you are most likely to use

2. Stays out of your way

The following discussion helps you exploit Windows XP’s almost limitless malleability to provide you access to all your software and the Windows XP interface with a minimum number of clicks.

This chapter covers:

• Making the Start menu more efficient

• Customizing the taskbar

• Using power shortcuts