Windows 7 has a wonderful dock. Personally, I like it a lot as I have always envied mac users who have enjoyed a dock for many years. This new windows taskbar is a worthy competitor for the mac OS dock. But this new system has not pleased all. It can become a little uncomfortable with the default settings, for long time xp users and at those times when you have multiple instances of the same app open. There is a small tweak which will make your windows 7 taskbar look and behave a lot like vista or XP. This will make users feel at ease and they can work faster. This is how the standard windows 7 taskbar looks like:
First of all , we need to unpin any pinned programs here. Right click and 'click unpin program from taskbar'.
Now, we are ready to add the 'quick launch' toolbar to our taskbar.
To do this, right click on the taskbar, go to Toolbars->new toolbar.
Navigate to User/Appdata/Roaming/Microsoft/Internet explorer/Quick launch . Then click Select folder after selecting Quick launch. (Pic shown below) NOTE: User is your PC name.
Next, Right click on Taskbar, and under the Taskbar buttons option in the taskbar tab, select Combine when taskbar is full and Apply.
Drag the Quick launch tool bar all the way to the left.
Right click on the Quick launch toolbar, and uncheck both show text and show title.
Now the Quick launch looks like this:
The Task bar will now look like vista/XP :
You can turn off Aero peek by Right click taskbar->Under preview aero desktop (taskbar tab)-> uncheck Aero peek to disable preview desktop feature.
You can Always get back to the usual default settings by removing the quick launch toolbar and using the Hide labels option from the taskbar properties menu.