Miss your old taskbar buttons? Revert ’em

For the first few weeks we spent with Windows 7, we stumbled around the new default taskbar like we were lost in a corn maze. Don’t get us wrong—we like most of the changes to it. But the big graphical icons signifying programs, as opposed to the horizontal-tiles-with-text that we were used to from Windows XP and Vista, made us think twice every time we approached the taskbar region. Was the app launched, or merely pinned to the taskbar?

We’re sure we’ll get the hang of the new taskbar yet, but in the meantime, we poked around and discovered that you can revert things to the way they used to be. (That’s comforting, since that can be said of so few things in life.)

Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties. This launches theTaskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box. (We’ll be coming back to this box more than a few times in this story.) On the Taskbar tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu called Taskbar buttons. We've circled it here:

Windows 7’s default installation has this menu set at Always combine, hide labels. Change the setting to Combine when taskbar is full or Never combine, as you see fit. (Never combine prevents the taskbar from grouping a given program’s multiple windows together when the taskbar gets crowded.) Voila: You’ll see the familiar taskbar buttons of old, replete with text labels.