Taskbar overlapped by maximized windows. How to?

I'm unhappy with the taskbar because it always takes space on my 14 inch laptop. 14 inch is already pretty small, so having the taskbar always take up space is inefficient.

The behavior that I'm looking for is simple: If I maximize a window, it should maximize over the taskbar, and if I press the "win" key the taskbar comes on top. How can I get that behavior?

Thank you for your help.
Wish you all the best,
God bless!

Not quite what you are asking for @Marron, but has the same effect letting a window make maximum use of the screen area:
Settings > Personalisation > Taskbar - turn on 'Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode' and/or '...in tablet mode'.

Taskbar then only pops up if your mouse cursor is at the bottom of the screen, you press WinKey, etc.

And don't confuse Maximized with Full Screen, separate things. Full Screen is obtained by pressing F11, does remove/obscure most things such as Toolbars and the Taskbar. Pressing F11 again toggles back to normal view. As mentioned there's also the Auto Hide Taskbar in Settings.

If I maximize a window, it should maximize over the taskbar, and if I press the "win" key the taskbar comes on top.

Pressing F11 does accomplish that.

Berton said:

Pressing F11 does accomplish that.

That's just for browsers, isn't it?

Bree said:

Not quite what you are asking for @Marron, but has the same effect letting a window make maximum use of the screen area:
Settings > Personalisation > Taskbar - turn on 'Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode' and/or '...in tablet mode'.

Taskbar then only pops up if your mouse cursor is at the bottom of the screen, you press WinKey, etc.

This is probably as close as it can get to what I'm looking for using default windows controls. The problem I have with this is that when I press the windows key it doesn't come up instantly, and when I get my cursor close to the top it pops up (even if I get my cursor to the top just to press the 'x' button to close a window). I used to achieve this behavior using 7-taskbar-tweaker, but it no longer works well to do that because of some windows updates.

I'm still looking for a good way to achieve this.

Bree said:

That's just for browsers, isn't it?

Appears to be but also may work in other programs, probably dependent upon how programs are coded. MSPaint shows only a white panel in the center, WordPerfect uses F11 to open its file management feature, Microsoft Word 2013 doesn't recognize it.

Marron said:

... when I get my cursor close to the top it pops up (even if I get my cursor to the top just to press the 'x' button to close a window.

Then it's probably better to place the taskbar at the bottom if you use this method. Unlock the taskbar (if it's currently locked) and drag it to the bottom.