One omission in Windows 7 that I find seriously annoying is the ability to “pin” harddrive shortcuts to the taskbar as a “one click” link. If you try to pin a shortcut to a directory on the taskbar it just adds it as a link under the “library” shortcut which forces you to look through a pop-up a list of directories then click the one you want. I want fast access to my drives and more specifically, my company folder. I found a great workaround to force Windows 7 to behave like I want.
The first thing I did was to create a shortcut to the “my computer” folder so I could have one-click access to all my drives. I did this by creating a new desktop shortcut with a target to “C:Windowsexplorer.exe shell:MyComputerFolder” without the quotes. This will create a shortcut on your desktop that targets your my computer folder. Since it’s actually a shortcut to a program (explorer.exe) Windows treats it like a real shortcut and allows you to pin it to the taskbar. Before I pinned this to the taskbar I changed the icon to look like a computer instead of a shortcut. You can find a great icon for the computer shortcut in this file: C:Windowssystem32imageres.dll.
The next thing I did was to create an icon from my company logo using photoshop to serve as my shortcut icon. This came out pretty nice and I know exactly what I’m getting when I click the shortcut. To create the shortcut to my company’s folder I made a new shortcut on the desktop with a target of “C:Windowsexplorer.exe d:%company directory%”. (Of course you replace the %company directory% with your actual target) Once that shortcut was created I changed the icon to the one I created from my company logo, then pinned the shortcut to the taskbar.
The last thing I did was to create a shortcut to my network by creating a shortcut to “C:Windowsexplorer.exe shell:NetworkPlacesFolder” I used an icon from the same place I found the computer icon. Then I simply dragged the three shortcuts all the way to the left so they will always appear as the first items on my taskbar.
Once you pin the shortcuts to the taskbar you can delete the shortcuts from your desktop.
