What Is This All About?

Yesterday I wrote about the basic things you can do with the Windows Toolbar functionality in the taskbar. Today will tell you about some clever little tips and tricks that allows you to use toolbars to help you get more productive and generally make your computing life a little easie

Today will show you how you can go from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

and a lot more!

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What Is This All About?

Going from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

(OK ignore the wallpaper in terms of this post)

I am sure everyone is familiar with the Windows Quick Launch Toolbar as part of the Taskbar. Dragging and dropping new shortcuts to it, or having them automatically installed as part of setting up a new program. Perhaps even dragging and dropping the icons in the Quick Launch area to get them into some sort of practical order. If you are like me it’s soon full of icons and you can’t remember what program they start so you rely on hovering the mouse cursor to get the tooltip. My own experience is that the tooltips don’t always work or take for ever to appear and it all becomes very frustrating. You want to show text and you can but then there isn’t enough space to get everything in!

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The Microsoft  Remote Shutdown Tool can also be used to shutdown or restart a local computer. Creating shortcuts to do this using the various options available enables different user defined alternative shutdown procedures to be defined. Also you can create a shortcut to STOP the shutdown process once started providing this is within the timeout period .

This is certainly not a new tip but a post today on one of my favorite blogs also showed how a GUI can be started, more of this at the bottom of this post. What I thought may be useful would be to give a overview of the available options and how to create the shortcuts to help less experienced readers.

This is a screenshot of three shortcuts I have created to shutdown, restart and stop the shutdown process.

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What Is It?

DeskPins is a program that will “Pin” any window to keep it “Always on Top” of other windows. While there are many other programs out there with this facility and some programs have this as a built in option for themselves, DeskPins has the extra ability to “Pin” by rules based on the Window name.

Why Would You Want It?

Loosing focus on the current window you are working in can be anything from irritating to disastrous if, like me, you are frequently looking away from the screen while typing. My recent post TIP - Stop Applications in Windows Stealing Focus gives you more information and a way to change settings to help deal with this problem. However, due to the different ways in which developers implement their programs the solution suggested doesn’t always work. DeskPins is a way of making sure that important programs that you are working in never loose focus (depending on how you set the rules ).

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Keeps any Window “Always on Top” (Topmost)
• Allows Rules to be set to Automatically “Pin” a window
• Wildcards allowed in rules
• Set Global Hotkeys

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Applications in Windows have a nasty habit of stealing focus from the program you are currently using. Generally this is because the default registry settings have been overwritten by a program installation. It is quite easy to change the settings back to the default either by editing the registry or by using a “Tweak” program such as Microsoft’s TweakUI. This problem has recently been driving me mad, I am not a touch typist so tend to spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard while typing. So, every time a program steals focus I loose the work I am typing and sometimes make changes to the program that stole the focus.

UPDATE - Also see this post DeskPins - Help to Stop Other Windows Stealing Focus

To change settings install TweakUI from here:

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