Windows comes with a nice built in feature to which some never pay any attention.   The ability to have toolbars added to your start/taskbar.  Did you know that you can create various toolbars showing icons to launch applications or access frequently used folders, or compressed to show as a popup menu with submenus?  Actually, it is quite easy!

The first thing I do on my systems is to move the task bar to the left side of the screen and set it to auto-hide.  I move the taskbar by:

* Right click on it and make sure “Lock the Taskbar” is not checked

* Hold down the mouse button over a black section of the taskbar and drag to the left side of the screen, it should then appear on the left.

* I resize the width of the taskbar to be about 1/4 to 1/5 the size of my screen.

Next, I add a new toolbar by right clicking a blank section of the bar, navigating to “Toolbars ->  New Toolbar..”.  Once it is created, I navigate to the applications I wish to add in the “Start -> All Programs” menus and right click on one and select “copy”, then go back to the toolbar window that is open and select “Paste Shortcut” and repeat this for all my favorite apps.

After I have all the applications in that toolbar folder that I want, I right click on the divider for the toolbar section in the taskbar (normally when first create one it will have a title, that is where I click but it can be any blank space in that toolbar) and change the View -> Large Icons enabled, and the “Show Text” is not enabled.

That will give you a nice toolbar on your taskbar that in my case is four rows of seven icons each row.  Anytime I want to launch an app, I simply move my mouse all the way to the left of the screen and my taskbar appears where I can click on the app to launch.

You can have it create popup menus by resizing the toolbar section smaller than the icons show, if they do not fit, it will make a popup out of them.

Another nice feature is that you can have folders nested inside the toolbar which will show as submenus on the popup menu.
By using this method you can virtually eliminate the need to hunt through the “Start” menu for applications or navigating to folders you use frequently!