Relocating Start Bar in XP/Vista

For starters I will give a very simple XP/Vista tip that I have found very useful and time saving. This boils down to personal preference as well but you may like it once you have tried it. I am talking about changing the location of the taskbar to the top of the screen rather than the bottom of the screen.

The first time I saw a demo for XP, I noticed that they had the start bar on top of the screen and I thought it was pretty cool, so I tried it out. I later thought about why this makes sense. If you notice, most of the buttons are closer to the top of the screen rather than the bottom of the screen. In modern machines, the resolutions are quite high meaning you have more ground to cover on the screen if you havent changed the sensitivity of the mouse. For a simple check, place the cursor in the middle of the screen, try moving the mouse cursor to the bottom left of the screen. Then start from center and move it to the top left. In most cases, you will notice that it takes less effort to move the mouse cursor to the top right, since you can do that by just moving your wrist and not having to move your hand. This is made even simpler when you move the mouse cursor from somewhere near the File/Edit/View menu's in any window, or even the X or - sign on a window. Its a lot easier and quicker to move to the top right compared to moving all the way to the bottom left.

Theres a catch though. This will work efficiently only if you have the taskbar locked on the top of the screen. If you choose to auto hide it, the close,maximize and minimize buttons go behind
the taskbar when you are in focus, and sometimes when you want to minimize, you might end up triggering the taskbar to show, in which case you would have to move the mouse down
and then move back up. This can get quite frustrating.

So the tradeoff here is that fans of auto hide might not like this and you lose a bit of real estate on the screen cos the taskbar is always showing and the close/maximize/minimize buttons are moved under it. But this works for me, and I have found that I am able to work a lot quicker with the taskbar on the top and auto hide disabled.

To set this up, right click on the task bar (not on any application window, on a blank space on the taskbar)
Make sure Lock the Taskbar is unselected.
Then drag the taskbar to the top of the screen
Right click, go to properties and disable auto-hide, and enable Keep taskbar above other windows, hit ok
You can then right click and lock the task bar again

Follow same steps to bring the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen(need to re enable auto-hide if you want it back the way it was)