Install Control Panel submenus in the Start menu

If you’re any kind of PC tweaker, like we are, you spend way too much time inside the Windows Control Panel. One of the quibbles we’ve had with past versions of Windows was the several layers of clicks you’d have to negotiate to get into the depths of Control Panel—especially with the Category as opposed to Classic view of the panel that was the default with Vista.

In Windows 7, you can set up the OS to allow you direct access to individual Control Panel items straight from the Start menu. To set this up, right-click the Start button in the taskbar, and choose Properties from the resulting context menu. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box that pops up, click the Start Menu tab, then the Customize button. Under the subcategory named Control Panel on the ensuing screen, choose Display as a menu. It's here:

Now, when you click Control Panel in the Start menu, you’ll get a selection list that shows all the same Control Panel sub-items that you’d get if you launched the Control Panel into its own window. It looks like this:

Launch Web pages straight from the taskbar

If you’re an all-day Web user—constantly jumping online in the midst of other tasks—you probably do a frequent two-step you might call the IE Shuffle (substitute “Firefox,” “Opera,” or “Chrome,” if you’re so inclined): Find your open browser or its launch icon (perhaps buried behind open windows or sitting on the Windows Desktop somewhere), launch it or maximize it, and enter your destination address in the address bar.

Not exactly a terrible hardship, but Windows 7 can save you some steps by letting you install a miniature address bar right in the taskbar. When you type an address into it, it launches a browser window and goes directly to that site. Handy! It also works with the uber-useful browser shortcut domain-name-plus-Ctrl + Enter. So, for example, if you want to visit www.computershopper.com, you can type just computershopper in this mini-address bar, then press Ctrl + Enter. The browser will autofill the “www.” and the “.com,” just like it would in your main browser window.

The address-bar-in-the-taskbar isn’t active by default, though. To set it up, right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the now-familiar Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off Address, then hit OK. Here's the dialog box:

You’ll now see the miniature address bar in the taskbar. It looks like this:

Enter a Web address, and Windows 7 will launch a browser window, already headed to your Web destination. Of course, this is Microsoft here, so this works by default with Internet Explorer 8, assuming that IE8 is set as your default browser. If you want to use the taskbar address window with another browser, you’ll have to set that one as your default.