Windows 7 Pin To Task Bar Trick

I like pinning things to my Windows 7 task bar (well, everyone needs a hobby I suppose). It provides quick access to the programs that I use most often. However, I found a snag with doing this, which was that it was hard to start a second copy of the program pinned on the task bar. If you press the icon on the task bar once the program is running you get sent to the open program, it doesn’t start another one.

Then, by mistake I found the answer today. If you right click on the icon in the task bar you get a menu the option to run another copy of the program. Very useful.

Comments

[Joe]

Shift+Click also does this.

[Rob Crocombe]

You can also use a middle click :)

[Joep]

And when you have right-clicked your icon, you can right-click the entry in the list and pick 'Run as Administrator' or edit the shortcut properties. Very useful too.

[James Croft]

No, Shift + Click will open another copy of the program.

You can simply just pull up the icon and it will reveal this too. That's how I always used to do it and still do.

[jsminch]

Yes. I like the right-click menu. It can also include a list of "recently opened" for the application, allowing you do open recent documents or whatnot directly. Or, as in the icon for Windows Explorer "Frequent." Very nice.

[nick]

if you left click on a taskbar icon, hold and drag upwards then you get the exact same result as right-clicking but the menu kinda slides up the screen as you drag upwards...very satisfying! Almost as nice as "pull to refresh"