Pin your Recycle Bin to the taskbar
If you’d like easy access to your Recycle Bin so you don’t have to fish through the clutter of your desktop to find it, you can pin it to the taskbar. Problem is, in Windows 7, the Recycle Bin doesn’t act like a normal program icon does. You can’t drag it directly onto the taskbar for pinning.
Start by right-clicking on an empty area of the desktop, and select New > Shortcut. In the field that says, Type the location of the item, enter this text, then click Next:
%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:RecycleBinFolder
You will be prompted to enter a name for the shortcut. Enter Recycle Bin (or really, anything you wish), then click Finish. This will place a shortcut onto your desktop that looks like a folder.
Next, you will need to add the actual Recycle Bin visual icon onto the shortcut. Right-click on the icon and select Properties. Then click the Change Icon button, select the Recycle Bin icon, and click OK. It looks like this:
Now, you can simply drag the icon onto your taskbar, and you are good to go. You can delete the shortcut on your desktop when you are done. And if you decide later that you want to remove the Bin from your taskbar, simply right-click on it and choose Unpin this program from taskbar. Disable taskbar Balloon Tips We’ve endured them through iteration after iteration of Windows, especially when our PC starts up: the Balloon Tips in the taskbar, those friendly pop-up reminders that your firewall is disabled, that you need to seek out antivirus software, that new updates for Windows are available…okay, perhaps let’s tweak “friendly” to “sometimes pesky.” (In truth, at times we wish we had a virtual pin to pop them; some days, our desktop calls to mind Nena’s 1980s hit 99 Luftballons.) Balloon Tips are well-meaning, of course, and you can always suppress the warnings by, well, actually taking action on them. But with Windows 7’s new Action Center, a unified destination for system notifications and warnings, you can get your fill of security and PC-maintenance heads-ups all in one place, so you might want to finally put the balloons to rest. (The Action Center, which resides by default in the lower right corner of the taskbar, raises a little warning icon if something needs attention.) In the taskbar, look for the Action Center icon (a little flag, possibly with a red “X” on it), right-click it, and choose Open Action Center. There, you’ll want to click on Change Action Center settings. You’ll get the Turn messages on and off screen next; it looks like this: 
Uncheck the various categories of advisory you’d rather not be warned of via Balloon Tips. Hit OK, and Balloon Tips in the relevant categories shouldn’t appear anymore. Just remember to check into the Action Center if you see a red “X” down there.
Control laptop settings (and save battery life) with Windows Mobility Center
The Mobility Center is not new—it was introduced with Windows Vista—but it’s not particularly well-known, and it’s worth revisiting for the XP faithful and those who only used Vista on a desktop PC. Mobility Center is a standard “dashboard”-type panel for laptops that summarizes crucial info about your portable. It’s back in Windows 7, and it allows you to make changes to your laptop’s battery-consumption schemes in a jiffy, making it easier for you to conserve runtime.
The easiest way to access Mobility Center on your notebook is to hold down the Windows key and press X. You can also do a quick desktop search for “Windows Mobility Center.”
The Mobility Center lets you see a display-brightness slider, a volume control, remaining battery life and power settings, and wireless connectivity status all at once. (All of these settings, to some degree, affect how long your system will last on the battery.) In the next row, you see Screen Orientation, which lets you rotate the LCD image; External Display, which makes connecting to a second screen easy; and Sync Settings, which lets you add new devices and control your syncing settings. Depending on your particular PC model, you may see more or fewer tiles, but this is the basic setup. Here's how it looks:
