We’ve had several reports of obduracy on the part of the XP (and Vista) Taskbar.
The principal complaint seems to be that it’s no longer possible to reduce the Taskbar from two rows to one – it skips the one-row stage and jumps straight to a thin line, similar to Autohide mode. And if you try to drag it back up it again skips the one-row stage, jumping back up to two.
Personally, I prefer two rows – I have buttons for running applications and open folders on the top row, with the Quicklaunch bar and Desktop Search below. I also find it useful to have the time, day and date showing in the Notification Area. And here, it seems, lies the problem.
With this arrangement it’s not possible to resize the bar to a single row. The solution is simple, but requires a modicum of manipulative skill. First, if you haven’t already done so, right-click on an empty spot on the Taskbar (you might have to close a few windows first) and make sure ‘Lock the Taskbar’ is not ticked or you won’t be able to do anything with it.
You should then see that each section of the Taskbar – the Task-switching buttons, the Quicklaunch toolbar, and whatever else you have there – has a handle to the left. With XP themes this is a dimpled vertical bar; in Classic view it’s a plain bar. In either case you can grab this with the left mouse button and drag the whole section around.
The trick is to drag the handles up or down so that each section ends up on the same row, which can be tricky, but if you persevere you’ll find that the Taskbar should automatically reduce itself to one row.
If it doesn’t, and you see that each section is ‘double-decked’ with two-row high handles, you will then be able to finish the job by dragging down the top edge of the Taskbar as normal. You can then drag the sections horizontally to the desired proportions. If you right-click on the bar again and tick ‘Lock the Taskbar’ you’ll protect it from accidental change.
Incidentally, it’s not compulsory to have the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen – when it’s unlocked you can click on an empty area and drag it to the top or sides of the Desktop.
Another Taskbar oddity that crops up from time to time is that the tooltips on the Taskbar and System tray items pop up behind the Taskbar itself, so you only see part of the tip.
We haven’t been able to fathom why Windows gets its Z-order in such a twist, but what appears to clear it is to go to Taskbar Properties, clear the ‘Keep the taskbar on top of other Windows’ box, OK out of the properties, then repeat the operation and check the box once again.
Saving searches
We've looked at Windows XP Desktop Search before, and we still think it’s pretty
good. Once you’ve set the indexing options up correctly, you can, for example,
find all documents that contain a certain word or phrase, as well as images
containing that word or phrase in their filename or metadata tags.
It’s a vast improvement on the standard XP Search Companion, both in speed and scope, but unlike the Search Companion, there’s no provision to save a Desktop Search. However, there is a rather crafty workaround. Having made a search, go to the Favourites menu and ‘Add to Favourites…’ You could now create a new ‘Searches’ folder under Favourites, but this isn’t mandatory.
You’ll find that when you open Explorer, (or Internet Explorer) your search has been preserved, and you can launch it either from the Favourites menu or by switching on the Favourites Explorer bar. Note that this preserves the search criteria, not the results, so depending on the latency of the indexing, you should always get up-to-date results.
