5
Clean Up Your Desktop, Start Menu, and Taskbar

Degunking Checklist:

Get rid of unwanted Desktop icons

Create Desktop icons you’ll use

Change the wallpaper and screen saver

Clean up the Start menu

Pin items to the Start menu

Personalize the Taskbar

Pin items to the Taskbar

Change Taskbar settings

Clean up the Notification area

Personalize the Notification area

In the previous chapters you learned how to remove and organize a lot of data and programs that reside in your folders. You might not realize it, but there are also a number of personalization and organizational tasks that you can perform on your Desktop to make Windows run better. Personalizing Windows 7 might not seem like a big deal, but it is. You can tell Windows 7 how you want the Taskbar and Start menu to look, and what should or shouldn’t appear on the Desktop. By personalizing Windows 7, you can work faster and smarter and perform tasks more efficiently than if you didn’t personalize at all. You can put what you need where you need it, making it a snap to open a program, locate a file, or perform a task. This is the fun part of de....