Why You Should Consider Moving the Windows Taskbar

If you’re a Windows user, you’ll most likely know that the taskbar can be moved to any edge of the screen by right-clicking it, unchecking “Lock the taskbar”, and then dragging the taskbar to the screen edge of your choice. By default, the taskbar appears at the bottom edge of the screen, and this is what most people envision when they think of the traditional Windows desktop.

Though the taskbar is placed at the bottom of the screen by default, that doesn’t mean it has to stay there. Moving the taskbar to the left or right hand sides of the screen could put it in a more useful location for you, and here’s why.

With the traditional size of today’s computer screens set at a 16:9 aspect ratio as opposed to 4:3, many applications leave a lot of wasted space on the left and right sides of the screen. Most webpages are oriented toward the center of the screen, and in those cases nearly half the screen space on a large monitor goes to waste. Word processing programs generally default to an 8.5×11″ display which once again wastes space on the left and right sides of the screen.

If you move the taskbar to the left or right side of the screen, you can take advantage of that wasted space while freeing up space on the bottom of your screen. Ubuntu does something similar to this by default by putting the launcher on the left side of the screen. Though Ubuntu has an OSX-like toolbar at the top of the screen, this does not take up extra space because it doubles as the title bar for any open windows.