Two Great Taskbar Apps for XP

    For the past two weeks I have been on vacation (hence the lack of blog posts). During this time I helped my brother purchase a new Windows Vista laptop. My experience with Vista had been limited, and I had a very negative attitude towards it which partially came from the abundant negative news on tech websites. This changed when I helped my brother with his new laptop. I liked the sleekness of the Vista OS, the security, and the taskbar thumbnail preview which gives a thumbnail preview of a taskbar item when the mouse is hovered over it. This led to me thinking very hard (smoke came out of my ears) about whether I should install Vista on my work computer. After hours of thought, I decided against the installation since Windows 7 is coming out soon and I didn't see the point of learning two OS's in less than 6 months. So, I decided to do a search for  "Windows XP Taskbar preview", and I came across a simple program called Visual Task Tips. After about two minutes for the download/install, I had thumbnail previews, which is the feature I wanted most from Vista!! 

    The other taskbar feature that I wanted and wasn't sure if it existed is the ability to change the location of taskbar buttons, for some reason I love having my important programs such as the browser or photo editor located to the far right. It would be neat if I could rearrange programs instead of having them appear in the order that they were opened. This lead to another Google Search, and I came across Taskbar Shuffle. This is again a simple, easy to install program. Within 2 minutes I could rearrange my taskbar buttons. Life is good.

  Thumbnail Preview