How to make iconized taskbar buttons on your XP:

Windows 7 taskbar doesn’t show text in application buttons, it only show their icons. Here’s how it will look like after you follow these steps:

And as you already know, previous Windows versions used to show icon as well as text in all application’s taskbar buttons. That takes too much space when you open lot of applications. And here is how it looks (although you know how it looks because you are using it now, but just for the record…)

As you can see, Windows 7 new iconized taskbar feature looks cool and it also saves a lot of space in the taskbar area.

There are 2 ways to do this.

1. Download a registry file that will automatically make necessary changes in your registry base and make your toolbar look like in the image above (the easy way - strongly recommended)

2. Manually make the changes in your Windows registry base to apply the above effect. (Only for advanced users - not really recommended).

I hope you have chosen the easy way (as we all do when choosing to do things in life right?), but if you really insist that you want to do it yourself, manually, then here’s how to do it:

1. Type regedit in RUN dialog box and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor. Now go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

2. In right-side panel, create a new String value MinWidth and set its value to -255

3. That’s it. Log off or restart your system and get ready to have iconized taskbar in your system.

4. To restore the default taskbar behavior, delete the MinWidth String value and log off or restart your system.

That’s all you need to do to make that XP desktop look as shiny and cool looking as Windows 7.

Credits for theme created to Vistart skin at DevianArt.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to share this post if you like it