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Sunday, April 20, 2008

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Vista Tip Worth Remembering: TaskBar Height and the Start Button

Some things you learn about and then proceed to forget about them. This is one of those cases for me. In fact I posted about this Vista performance tip what seems like ages ago here on GBM. I thought it was worth fresh look so here we go.

Start2 The round Start Button or Orb can cause the GPU to force a non-rectangular clipping operation when it is overlapping a maximized window. This indeed causes some performance issues, especially on lower end graphics hardware. The best way to remedy the situation is to resize your Taskbar so that it is double height, which encompasses the Orb.

I long ago had forgotten about this and the taskbars on the Tablet PCs I use and test were all set to the default single row height. While at the MVP Summit, we were all Start1 comparing things we do and don’t do to improve performance and this tip resurfaced. It was one of those D’OH, slap yourself in the forehead moments then. Since returning home I’ve been doing some testing on this and I’ve noticed that on both the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and the HP tx2051, it makes a significant improvement in screen redraws when I swivel the screen from laptop to Tablet mode.

Here’s the link to the original tip on the Tablet PC Team Blog. You’ll need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the article to find it.

Tags: Tablet+PC, Vista+Start+Button

Tablet PC

4/20/2008 1:07 PM MST

Vista Tip Worth Remembering: TaskBar Height and the Start Button Comments [8] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:24:34 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Warner - that would be a great workaround for people with large screens, but how useful is this to Table PC folks, who are often have small screens and are not happy with devoting an extra taskbar row to accomodating Microsoft's big orb?

It would be much better to have some way to shrink the orb.

Mickey Segal

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:53:25 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

The alternative then would be to use the Windows classic theme.

Ryan

Sunday, April 20, 2008 2:57:36 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Thanks I think I'll use the classic theme since I have WXGA resolution.

Now I really wish there was a simple free way to get the XP look for Vista.

zunq

Sunday, April 20, 2008 3:20:52 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Well, that was a good post and a nice set of tips that were linked. I doubled the height of my taskbar which gave room for the entire, clickable date time info on the right-hand edge. That, in turn, allowed me to turn off the Sidebar where I had a calendar and clock gadget running. It also gave room for the handful of quickstart icons I use to all be displayed on the left side - no all accessible by one click instead of 2.

And, from the tips, I dropped just the transparency from Aero.

I like what I see, and should have tweaked man and machine performance just a tad.

Cestfiu

Sunday, April 20, 2008 3:29:34 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Mickey,

I'm with you. I miss the screen real estate as well, but once again, we are forced to deal with trade offs.

Warner Crocker

Sunday, April 20, 2008 4:21:12 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

If the folks at Microsoft don't use any 800 x 600 devices (or smaller) they will cheerfully go on designing for the desktop and destroy the usability of Windows on smaller devices.

I spent some time today trying out Windows Live Mail, the successor to Outlook Express and Vista's Windows Mail. It is totally hopeless to run it on 800 x 600, as detailed at http://www.gottabemobile.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=5519, in contrast to its predecessors that worked fine at that resolution. Most of the problems are attributable to not having used the application at 800 x 600, but some seem like the marketing ploys on Internet Explorer 7 (and 8) that try to keep people from installing the Google toolbar.

It is painful to watch Microsoft destroying itself. They've done so many great things, including launch Tablet PCs, but since the top few software engineers left over the past few years they are acting like a case from a Clay Christensen book; serving the most complicated markets and ignoring the growing "small" market.

The tweaks to make things work well on mobile computers are so simple, but Microsoft is no longer paying attention. It is sad to see greatness destroyed.

Mickey Segal

Sunday, April 20, 2008 5:18:34 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I use a triple-row taskbar on a small 1024x768 screen. I don't mind doing this because I set the taskbar to "Auto-hide" itself. I personally don't feel a need to see a permanently-anchored taskbar at all times.

Victor

Monday, April 21, 2008 1:52:24 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

This is a strange issue. Thankfully, I always tend to increase the height of my taskbar to 2 rows as I always have numerous windows open and I like to have a quick access to all of them. Plus, having 2 rows makes the time section of the taskbar display the full date and time instead of only time.

Eltawil

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