This is a very small and useful program for Windows 7, letting you instantly turn on or off the text beside the taskbar icons.

You may usually prefer the new Windows 7 style of the taskbar, featuring just the icons of all open applications, reserving space and supporting better focus. There are conditions under which you might prefer, at least for a while, to see the text beside these taskbar icons, e.g., when you use programs that display real time information at their taskbar buttons, such as emule, torrent clients, etc.

In such cases, a keyboard shortcut that would instantly display this text would be ideal. This is the purpose of the Taskbar Labels freeware.

Here is a picture of taskbar icons without text – more room, less information:

And another one after Taskbar Labels revealed the icons’ text – less room, more information:

Taskbar Labels is a portable application: just unpack the contents of the zip file to a folder of your choice (the default is TaskbarLabels) and create a shortcut to the executable wherever you like – in your startup folder, if you want the program to run with Windows).

The default keyboard shortcut to hide or reveal taskbar icon labels is Ctrl+F11, but you can change it at will, by right clicking the icon of Taskbar Labels at the System Tray. First time it runs, Taskbar Labels will pop up a message; after its ini file (simple text file containing its configuration) is created, you won’t see any other pop ups.

Taskbar Labels is small, handy, portable, and absolutely free from viruses, spyware, ads, etc. If your anti-virus application alerts you, you can safely ignore it and include Taskbar Labels among your safe programs. And, now that you can control the text of your taskbar, perhaps you’d like also to make those Taskbar buttons larger than usual, to display lengthier titles.

• Download Taskbar Labels freeware
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PAD (XML) file of Taskbar Labels

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