Windows 7 Start Button Size

Saturday, 23 May 2009 13:44 row1

My biggest gripe about running Windows 7 on a netbook is not the performance but the size of the start button and taskbar on the 1024x600 display. Instead of the usual bottom position, I like to have the taskbar on the side as it is easier to manage multiple open applications/windows. In Windows 7 (and Vista I guess...) the start button and taskbar's width seem to have ballooned, even turning on small icons does not help.
Windows XP:

Windows 7 beta:

Windows 7 RC 1:

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Last Updated on Saturday, 30 May 2009 22:35

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0 #4 2010-11-07 01:30

PS. You can't blame a OS/software manufacturer for groping for screen real estate. You can notice that the skinability of Internet Explorer was no longer a feature at the same time when the whole controls got bigger. Adobe Acrobat did the same. The most blatant is the Office, there have been 3 different, increasingly invading style since the mid 90's.
Having a fixed distinguishible livery visible from afar is free corporate advertising on milions of "mini advertising pannels" around the world. It can be worth to check out the guys who got MS in Europe to let choose a different web navigator, and have them force microsoft to reimplement size control.

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0 #3 2010-11-07 01:27

I just installed Windows 7, and I unfortunately I don't have a lot of time at the moment to try things.

But I think the best (most global) solution is themes (I can't quite make if there is a difference between "themes" and "styles").

When you search for "themes", you can see that some of them look rather compact. Unfortunately the people in the "theme" business are graphic artists who care more about displaying their nifty background BMP on a 2048 x *** display than functionality (you can't even make out the exact compactness of the adress bar from their screencaptures) .

So I had no luck looking for "Windows 7 theme compact 1024 x ... (but I only devoted 20 minutes to this search). Let everybody know someone finds this theme

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0 #2 row1 2010-02-15 17:05

Could not find a solution

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0 #1 2010-01-17 11:22

have you found a workaround ?
because i'm in the exact same situation : i loved the width of the windows xp vertical taskbar and i'm unable to do it on Vista :(

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