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Pinning ‘my computer’, recycle bin, control panel to taskbar or superbar in windows 7

July 14th, 2009 Author: Categories: Tips

windows 7 iconSo far I’ve enjoyed using Windows 7 much more than Vista. One thing I’ve found annoying is I would like to pin the Recycle Bin, My Computer, and Control Panel to the taskbar or ‘superbar‘ as it is called now. Once you do this you can theoretically have an icon free desktop existence. I remember seeing many tips back in the Windows 95 day and even up until Vista, stating that an uncluttered desktop fosters a faster computer. This makes sense since your PC has to redraw all of those icons AND a background picture if you had one, each time you do something on the desktop. By moving all of those icons into the taskbar, you offload the heavy lifting to the taskbar applet that is always running anyway.


Adding Recycle Bin:

1. right-click anywhere on the desktop and when the menu box opens, choose new -> shortcut.
2. enter the text below in the ‘type the location of the item:’ field.
%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:RecycleBinFolder
3. give it a name like ‘recycle bin’, click on finish and it will create a shortcut
4. drag this new shortcut from the desktop to taskbar and pin it.
5. you can now remove the desktop shortcut if you prefer.

Adding My Computer:

Do every step above, just replace the text in step 2 from above with the following:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:MyComputerFolder

Adding Control Panel:

Do every step above, just replace the text in step 2 from above with the following:

explorer shell:ControlPanelFolder

Final note:

If you would like to change the icon of the shortcuts, right-click on the shorcut of the new icon created and hit ‘properties‘. Click on ‘change icon‘ button and enter the address below in the ‘file location box’

%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll

Pick the one you want and press ‘apply’ button.

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