The windows XP taskbar appears at the bottom of your computer screen and contains several convenient area to make working easier such as the start button, the quick launch bar, the window tabs, and the system tray.
Start Button
The Windows Start button, pictured below is on the bottom left corner of your desktop on the windows TaskBar. Clicking on the Start button allows you to begin almost any task on your computer. The Start Button opens the Windows XP start menu
If you right-click on the Start button, a local menu appears. Several items on this menu are particularly useful:
- Open – clicking this item opens the Start Menu folder as a window on your desktop and provides an alternative method so you can double click on the icons to open applications.
- Explore – opens Windows Explorer.
- Search - opens the windows search dialogue box
- Properties - opens the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties box where you can customize these items
Window Tabs
Whenever you open an application, the operating system places a tab on the taskbar that will let you switch between applications by clicking on the appropriate tab. Some window tabs are pictured below.
A nice feature of Windows XP is that it can group applications belonging to a single application suite such as Word or Firefox. To access individual documents, click on the tab and a menu will appear so you can choose the correct document. For example, on the tabs pictured, see the number 58 on the firefox tab that means there are 58 browser windows open. You can disable this feature by clicking on Properties and then un-checking the box next to Group similar taskbar buttons.
However, I can’t imagine why you would want to disable this feature.
System Tray
Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program icons are displayed in the system tray if they have the ability to put an icon in the tray. In addition to the TSRs, the system clock is also displayed as shown below.
For example in the picture, it shows that Computer Associates virus protection 
, speaker volume control 
, Microsoft Outlook 
and Google desktop 
have a program loaded in memory. The presence of the arrow indicates that there are more TSRs running on the machine. Clicking on the arrow will display them.
If you right click on a TSR’s icon you will open a menu that that allows you to use, configure or close the application.
Quick Launch Bar
By default, the show desktop icon and the windows explorer icon are visible in the quick launch bar. You can add or delete as many icons as you want. This is useful since the Windows XP quick launch bar pictured below provides one click access to your applications, files or folders.
See the double arrows in the upper right hand corner. When I click on it the menu below appears. As you can see, I have added quite a few icons to my Quick Launch bar.
Adding Icons
To add an icon to the quick launch bar, drag the icon for the item from windows explorer to the quick launch bar and drop it by releasing the mouse button. Windows will add a shortcut to the application.
Deleting Icons
To delete an icon from the quick launch bar, right click on the icon you want to delete and then select delete from the menu that appears. This will delete the shortcut to the application.
Customizing Taskbar Items
There are several items on the Win XP taskbar that can be customized. Right click anywhere on the taskbar itself and click on Properties. The Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box below will open.
You can select several items to customize:
- Lock the taskbar – does not allow any changes
- Auto-hide the taskbar – causes the taskbar to drop out of sight along the edge of the screen until you place the mouse pointer in that area. Then it will reappear. This provides a larger viewing area on the screen
- Keep the taskbar on top of other windows – this makes the taskbar always visible no matter what you are doing.
- Group similar taskbar buttons - this combines multiple windows from the same application into one window tab. When you click on the tab, a menu will appear and let you choose the correct document.
- Show Quick Launch – displays or hides the Quick Launch Bar
- Show Clock – displays or hides the clock
- Hide inactive icons – if selected, inactive icons will not be displayed
Customize Button
When you click on the customize button, the window below opens.
As shown in the picture below, you can decide whether to hide or show icons on an individual basis.
Summary
Customizing the taskbar allow you to setup your computer to work in a manner that is comfortable for you.
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