Hasta La Gadget!

Nov 06

CyberNotes: Getting Your Taskbar Onto Another Monitor

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on November 30, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

I have been using my laptop as a second monitor for a few weeks now and it has made me more productive than ever. Instead of using my small 14″ laptop screen as the primary monitor I prefer to use my 24″ LCD as the main one because my laptop is off to the right of me and I only glance it once in awhile.

Last week Lifehacker featured a free software solution, called Multi-Monitor, that lets you extend your Taskbar onto your second monitor. It is awesome because it will only show you applications on each Taskbar that are on their respective monitor. It is definitely intuitive and I was surprised that it even worked on Windows Vista.

Image from RealTimeSoft Multiple Monitor Gallery

One thing that I didn’t like about it, however, was that it isn’t skinned and looks like something back in the days of Windows 95. I’m sure that isn’t a big deal for most people but I like things to coordinate.

I didn’t really need a second Taskbar and what I was really looking for was a way to get the Taskbar off of my laptop and onto my external monitor. There is an option in the Display Settings that lets you choose which screen is your “main monitor,” but it wouldn’t let me choose that option for some reason.

I searched the Internet and came up empty handed but then something clicked (no pun intended)…I then thought that there was no way Microsoft would have made it this easy. To my surprise they did, so here is how to move your Taskbar to another monitor:

If you have the Taskbar locked you’ll need to right-click on it and uncheck the option that says Lock the Taskbar.
Now here’s the big one…drag the Taskbar onto the other monitor! You can put it wherever you would like.

I couldn’t believe that it was really that easy and now I feel a little stupid for thinking it would be harder than that. I guess we all have to learn these things sometime.