TWEAK YOUR TASKBAR & DESKTOP
Make the taskbar more useful
The taskbar has been around since Windows 95 and it’s easy to take for granted. Winaero Tweaker’s ‘Desktop and Taskbar’ section lets you give the long-neglected taskbar a makeover. Always keen to know the exact time, we’ve used it to set the taskbar clock to show seconds as well as hours and minutes. To do this, click the Show Seconds on Taskbar Clock option, select ‘Make taskbar clock show seconds’, then click Restart Explorer.
You can also ditch the horizontal volume slider that was introduced in Windows 10 in favour of the traditional vertical slider from previous versions of Windows - select Old Volume Control and tick the box next to ‘Enable the old volume control’. Unlike the modern control (which requires you to right-click the speaker icon), this also gives you quick access to the Mixer (see screenshot above right), letting you quickly change the volume of different programs. Equally helpful is Battery Flyout, which lets you switch your laptop’s power plan in a flash – particularly useful if your battery is running very low on charge.
We also like that you can tweak the preview windows that appear when you hover your cursor over program icons on your taskbar. Select Taskbar Thumbnails, then move the ‘Thumbnail size’ slider to the right to make the preview windows easier to see (we’ve set ours to 400). Alternatively, if you find the previews more of an annoyance, tick ‘Disable thumbnails completely’.
Improve the Start menu and search box
According to Microsoft, the animated Live Tiles in the Windows Start menu are supposed to make it feel more ‘dynamic’, but for many of us they’re merely irritating. You can disable them by right-clicking each tile and choosing
More, then ‘Turn Live Tile off’, but Winaero Tweaker lets you turn them all off with one click. Click Disable Live Tiles in the ‘Desktop and Taskbar’ section, and when you next sign into Windows your Start menu will be less ‘dynamic’. Note that this won’t actually remove tiles, only their animations, but it will prevent any new pinned apps from using Live Tiles.
This isn’t the only irritation in the Start menu. Type a query into the Start menu and Windows mixes the results from your hard drive with web-search suggestions (see screenshot below left) – something we’ve never found useful. To stop this, click Disable Web Search and select ‘Disable web search in Cortana and taskbar’. Restart your machine and future searches will be limited to your PC.
Winaero Tweaker also lets you create a backup of your current Start menu layout. So if you’ve got it looking just as you want it, you won’t have to do it all again if you need to reinstall Windows. Click Backup/restore Start Menu Layout, choose Export Start Menu Layout and save it as a registry file in the ‘winaerotweaker’ folder. You can then choose Restore Start Menu Layout to reapply your preferences.