Taskbar full of icons

Information

Since Windows 7, we’ve been able to pin programs to the taskbar for quick and easy access to our most used software, however with each windows release more and more items are added by default to the taskbar. In modern version of Windows 10 a lot of the space is taken up by icons such as the search bar, TaskView and people buttons.  In this article, we’re going to show you some of the ways you can save space on your taskbar.

Solution

We’re starting off with what we would consider a fairly cluttered taskbar. It has all the default settings and has a lot of programs pinned to it.

1. The first thing we recommend doing is replacing the search bar with a search icon. This frees up the space taken up by the search bar, and still allows you to access the search menu with 1 click. To do this;
   1. Right click within your search bar
   2. Select the Cortana sub-menu
   3. Choose Show Cortana icon
      
      
2. Next, if you don’t use the People menu, disable it. This can be done by;
   1. Right click the taskbar (or your search icon)
   2. Untick Show people on the taskbar
      
      
3. While we’re looking at the system tray, you can see that there are quite a few tray icons visible that aren’t always needed. You can easily hide these by dragging them into the hidden icons area.
   1. Drag an icon up from the tray and drop it in to the hidden icons area which will appear automatically
      You can access the hidden icons by clicking the up arrow.
      
4. The last thing we recommend is unpinning items you don’t want on your taskbar.
   1. Right click the icon you want to remove
   2. Select Unpin from Taskbar

The end product leaves us with taskbar that has plenty of room left for the essentials, and even allows you to Enable old-style taskbar icons with the window name/title similar to Winodws Vista and earlier.

Tips

• The Windows 10 start menu lets you pin as many tiles as you want to it, very similar to the taskbar, and is much better for having a large number of programs easily accessible, while leaving the taskbar for the essentials.
• Following on from Step 2. If you don’t care about having quick access to the search window, you can disable the icon outright. You can still access search by opening the start menu and starting to type. Windows will instantly start searching for what you type.
• You can also disable other icons such as the TaskView icon and the Windows ink workspace by rightclicking the taskbar.