After last night’s post on Live Mesh, which included a screenshot of my desktop, Garry Martin dropped me a line to ask about the large icons in my Quick Launch Toolbar.

I can’t claim credit for discovering this but it’s a tip I heard Paul Thurrott describe on a Windows Weekly podcast a while back and it doesn’t seem to be very well known.

First of all, I changed the height of my Taskbar by clicking and dragging on the top edge. Next, I unlocked the Taskbar and arranged the toolbars so that the Quick Launch toolbar is visible above the row of taskbar buttons. Finally, selecting large icons involves right-clicking on the divider to the left of the Quick Launch Bar and selecting large icons in the view menu option.

Also, as Paul mentions in his more Windows Vista Tips article, the Windows and number keys can be used together to launch the applications that are linked from the Quick Launch bar (the first 10 of them anyway) (e.g. in the screenshot above, windowskey+5 would launch Outlook and windowskey+0 would launch Notepad, etc.

My system is running Windows Server 2008 but this tip also applies to Windows Vista, Server 2003 and XP (I didn’t try any earlier versions of Windows)