Some people like the order of the programs in the taskbar to be, shall we say, predictable. I am one of them.
Usually I achive this by opening the programs after a reboot in a certain order, but every once in a while I need a different program (urgently) first – or Explorer crashes – and then I am out of luck.
My hand still guides the mouse to the spot where I usually have the item, but then I need to spend extra time finding out where it is now.
I came across programs a while ago that would re-shuffle the items, but I didn’t want to spend the memory to have that feature. But I gave up now.
I just installed one, and I should have done so a long time ago.
I decided to go for Taskbar Shuffle. It has more features than Taskix or Taskbar Button Manager and it still only consumes between 1MB and 4MB of RAM – and it is also offered free of charge – as are the other two (the author does accept donations).
Considering that I am up to the Gigabytes in RAM, I think I can afford the memory footprint now. Yes, I do hit the physical RAM barrier frequently, but I can always exit the app if I feel I need the extra little MB. By the way, you can also turn it off and keep it running if you accidentally keep re-ordering items – or you can set the program to only work while pressing a special key (selectable)
Taskbar Shuffle can also re-order your system tray icons and has a few other settings, one of them to change the grouping behaviour of your taskbar items.
One mention though – it does set itself to run at Windows startup (option can be turned off in the program), but it doesn’t start itself after the install – so you need to start it manually at least the first time.
Mark Krieger helps small businesses to create systems for success - both on the IT and operations side.www.makbiz.ca