72XP: Some GUI changes
Jan 3, 2010 Tech
Now for the next installment of 72xp, were going to make some GUI changes.
The superbar seems to be a pretty good idea, as in the idea of pinning items it, sortof like an advanced quicklaunch. pinning things to the start menu isnt really all that new though. now for me, i prefer my quicklaunch to just do one thing, launch stuff, i also prefer to keep it in one place so i know where it is, i only have 2 icoons in there anyway. having an advanced version that combines with the ttaskbar and spreads the whole length of it is just confusing and useless. to get it to act more or less like XP, apply the following tweaks.
First, unpin all the existing items on the superbar by right clicking them and choosing “unpin”, Then right click the taskbar/superbar and choose properties, select “lock the taskbar” and “use small icons”, this will lock the task bar and make it basically the same size as it was in XP.
If in XP you used the taskbar grouping feature, this feature is also available in windows 7, personally i never used this myself. you can choose how it acts in the taskbar buttons drop down menu, chose “never combine”. the notification area in windows 7 is also similar to XP, except it has its very own control panel item now, which you can access by clicking “customise” in the notifcation area section. personally i never hide any notification area/system tray icons. but you can choose which ones to show or hide in this dialog.
I also disabled aero peak (which is the little preview window that pops up when you put your mouse over a taskbar button). by unchecking the box in the bottom section. but this seems to be not enough to disable aero peak, so here are a couple of extra things i did:
disable aero peak in group policy:
click start
type “gpedit.msc“, hold down ctrl & press enter (this will start the process with admin priviledges so that there are no problems with permissions when you come to apply the policies.
once the window opens, click the + sign next to “administrative templates” under the “user configuration” section, then click “start menu ad taskbar”, a list of policies will appear in the right hand window, in list list scroll right down to the bottom and double click on the last one, to disable the aero thumbnails select “enabled”, this will enable the disablement of the thumbnails (confusing i know :p). usually to make sure this policy is applied i logoff and log back on again.
There is also a registry tweak you can try:
open registry editor (start > regedit > ctrl + enter).
navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
add a new DWORD Called “TaskbarNoThumbnail”, set the value to 1. logoff and log back on again for the changes to take effect.
If it still isnt gone, go here, and download the “7 Taskbar Tweaker”, this is a very handy little program that you can use to disable the aero peak as well as a lot of other things. to disable the aero peak thumbnails, click “disable” box in the “preview thumbnails” section.
Some of the other options I chose with this program was the changing of the middle click mouse button to “close window”, i was used to doing this in XP as I was running a taskbar tweaking app on there too which also modified the middle click button, so middle clicking a button and getting another instance of the same app was really irritating.
I also use this app to enforce the “no grouping” setting, when your happy with the changes you have made with this app, click apply. Now the only thing with this little app is that it has to be running to have the effects in place, if you click the “settings button” you will see that there is an option for running it when windows starts, i have that checked, i also have the icon in the notification area hidden via the option too, so although it runs in the background, i dont mind it using up a relatively small amount of resources for the customisation options it gives me.
Thats all for today, coming next, how to get the classic start menu from XP back, stay tuned! 
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