Setting up taskbar exactly like on Win7?

Hello,

Is there a way to configure Win10's taskbar to look exactly like it did on Win7?

Besides displaying the bar vertically on the left, I'm used to having a set of oft-used apps (ie. pinned) at the top, followed by the apps currently running, and icons at the bottom.

Ideally, I'd rather have Win10 look this way.

Thank you.

If you're talking about Quick Launch, yes that is still supported. It is not enabled by default.
Quick Launch icons are stored in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch.

A tutorial can be found here: Add or Remove Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 10

You may have some issues with Taskbar color and transparency. It's a little bit fussy and stubborn on WIndows 10 compared to Windows 7.

I also use Open-Shell (classicshell), to get the "windows 7 start menu" experience back.

That is pretty much the same as the standard Windows 10 Tiles.

The Windows 10 Tiles have a lot more useful options. e.g. size of Tiles, and labelling of sections.

I also put the most useful ones at the top, just amounts to dragging them there.

Wobitancrawfodi said:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

That is the correct folder location for sure, BUT... you can just pick whatever the folder you like to use instead. So, in step 2 of the tutorial you linked, you don't necessarily have to paste anything, as it is perfectly possible to just navigate to your own folder where you keep your shortcuts you want.

On a fresh installation of Windows, I always just paste %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch in the address bar of a File Explorer window, and, next, I copy the Show desktop shortcut that can be found in there. I paste this shortcut into my own folder and I follow the rest of the tutorial like how I explained above. My taskbar is horizontal at the bottom of my screen, but I like to have the Show desktop icon next to my Start button so that's why. But anyway, my point is that there is no real reason why anyone would want to still continue to use %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch for anything. That is, anything except maybe to copy the Show desktop shortcut that still exists in there. There are close to a hundred (or maybe even more) tutorials available on the internet all of which are exactly similar. But I have yet to find a single one that also mentions what I just said. And I still don't understand why.

As for the stubborn colors and the transparency that is more opaque than it is transparent. A software engineer named Charles Milette made a nice free open source app to fix that old gargantuan monstrosity of a nightmare. Here:
GitHub - TranslucentTB/TranslucentTB: A lightweight utility that makes the Windows taskbar translucent/transparent.
As you probably could have guessed, this app has already been downloaded by millions of people worldwide, it has undoubtedly become the most popular form of cromotherapy everywhere. lol

hdmi said:

you can just pick whatever the folder you like to use instead.

True that. I've never felt the need to use any other location.
I should have said "The default location". I stand corrected.

Wobitancrawfodi said:

True that. I've never felt the need to use any other location.
I should have said "The default location". I stand corrected.

Of course there's no NEED to use another folder location─that was only a suggestion. I just like to choose a folder that is easier for me to remember where I can find it, one that doesn't already contain the "Switch between windows" and the "Microsoft Egde" shortcut neither of which should appear on my Quick Launch bar, and, even though I could always decide to remove these shortcuts of course, the Quick Launch bar is not the only toolbar that I like to keep visible on my taskbar so, because they are multiple folders, I just prefer to store them all in one place.

Further, scripts can run invisibly in the background so it also is possible to write your own easy scripts to let the visible contents of a toolbar be changed dynamically on-the-fly, e.g. as part of some Action that gets triggered in Task Scheduler. (Or simpler─as a result of the user clicking on one of the shortcuts that are visible on the toolbar.) Toolbars on the taskbar are an incredibly useful feature. Unfortunately however, this feature (and the whole Windows 10 taskbar altogether) are replaced with some sort of─to put it mildly─amateurishly dumbed down aberration in Windows 11 (which I am using), but luckily there exists a solution to this, ExplorerPatcher, and that can also be used on Windows 10 to get some additional features that I find to be very useful. (Simple Window Switcher is only one example of why ExplorerPatcher can be very useful, on Windows 11 AND on Windows 10.) BTW, I totally agree with your earlier suggestion to use Open-Shell. I have been using it with the Windows 7 style choice for the Start Menu, even when I was still on Windows 7 (more than 10 years ago, when Open-Shell was still known as Classic Shell), because I think it is actually even quite a lot better than the official, or original Start Menu of Windows 7.

Thanks very much.

Open-Shell + tweaking Quick Launch did it.

Winfried said:

Open-Shell + tweaking Quick Launch did it.

Good to hear. All the best.