Windows 7: Thin Vertical Taskbar

With the widescreen monitors I like to have my Windows 7 Taskbar positioned on the left edge of the monitor with Auto-hide turned on. There are many benefits of this:

• With widescreen monitor the horizontal space is plentiful
• Having the Taksbar on the left keeps it out of the areas where you may do mouse based activity. Having it on the right edge interferes with mouse based scrollbar activity

But no matter how much I try I cannot make it thinner than this:

I can make it very short when the Taskbar is horizontal:

How I wish I could make it thinner like this:

I got annoyed enough that I went googling and figured out a way that works for me. I am going to show you how. Just follow these step:

• Set the taskbar settings like so:

Right-click on the taskbar and select Properties menu to show the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog.

• Create a file ThinTaksBar.bat with content:

echo ThinTaskbar
net stop "UxSms"
net start "UxSms"

It basically restarts the service "UxSms". This needs to be run as administrator. You can run the script manually with as administrator using the runas command like this:

> runas /noprofile /user:administrator ThinTaksBar.bat

• To automate this create a scheduled task using Task Scheduler. Configure to run it with highest priviledges approximately 2 minutes after login like so:

Next time you log in, after a minute or so you will have the thin Taskbar.

Thats all folks!