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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Windows 7 tip

1:07 PM / Technology / No Comments

Probably the most significant change Microsoft made with Windows 7, at least from the perspective of day-to-day interaction with the operating system, is the newfangled taskbar, which acts like an odd hybrid of the old Windows taskbar (used from Windows 95 to Windows Vista) and Mac OSX's dock. If, like me, you don't like change for the sake of change and thought the old taskbar was perfectly fine, this can be a bit of an irritation. Luckily, it's fairly easy to rejig the taskbar to look like and work in much the same manner as the old one...

With one exception: context menus. How many of you, when you wanted to close a window, were used to simply right-clicking on the corresponding taskbar icon, moving the mouse a few pixels to the right and clicking "Close"? I certainly was, and years of using this method mean that I no longer give it any thought when I do it. It comes to me as naturally as putting one foot in front of the other. (I know the Alt-F4 shortcut is even quicker, but that only applies if the window you want to close is the active one. If you have a bunch of windows you want to close quickly, the mouse is still your best friend.) In Windows 7, however, right-click the taskbar icon and you'll see something like this:

Looks reasonably familiar, right? The "Close" button is still there, only it has been moved slightly. Now, instead of appearing where the cursor is position when you right-click, the context menu always appears centred directly above the taskbar icon. This is more of an irritation than you might think. It means that, because the "Close" button is no longer always the same distance from wherever the cursor is positioned, you actually have to look at where it is and then move the cursor over to it accordingly. Sounds simple, but it requires more active thought than before and slows down what should be a near-instantaneous process. I'm not saying the new context menu doesn't have its uses - the ability to pin the corresponding program to the taskbar or see a list of files recently opened in that program is great, and I also love that you can now reorder the open programs on the taskbar by clicking and dragging - but these uses are overshadowed considerably by the sheer irritation of the menu's placement.

I trawled the web, searching high and low for a way to replace the Windows 7 context menu with the old Windows 95-Vista version, but to no avail. Then, today, quite by chance, I came across the solution myself: hold down the Shift button when you right-click and you get the old context menu:

A handy tip if, like me, you're using Windows 7 and have been finding the new context menu an irritation.

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