Taking On the Taskbar

That lowly bar at the bottom of your screen rates as the best piece of real estate in Windows. Why? You can always get to it, no sweat, with (at most) a simple swoosh of the mouse. The taskbar shows you everything that is running - the ultimate "adaptive" menu. Drag a file onto a taskbar button, and the associated program opens, ready for the file to be dropped. That little bar packs a whole lotta power. Microsoft hides the power of the Windows XP taskbar. Consider the default Windows XP Professional taskbar shown in Figure below.