Where is this leading?
Well, since XP (and possibly earlier, I can't remember), Windows has had detachable that could sit on your desktop and display the contents of folders or drives. All you had to do was right click on the Taskbar and select Toolbars> New Toolbar and select the folder who's contents you wanted it to display. This was also a popular solution for people will billions of items in their "Quick Launch" toolbar, as you could detach it and make it span the length of the monitor to display them all.
The XP incarnation of toolbars was the best, as you could detach toolbars from the taskbar and have them floating on the desktop, or dock them to the edges of the screen and have them auto-hide like the taskbar. Beautiful. You couldn't very well ask for more. But you can always ask for less, and apparently due to the fact people would get "confused" when accidentally dragging toolbars off the taskbar, Microsoft removed the floating toolbar feature in Vista. Logic would have probably dictated that all they really had to do was set the taskbar to "locked" by default, but apparently Vista's search functionality was so unbelievably powerful, people wouldn't miss this feature.[reference] Right. Clicking on the Start button and trying to remember the name of the folder you wanted to open, then actually typing it in, before finally trying to identify the right folder from the list is SO much faster than having a list displayed on your desktop at all times you can just click on.
Anyway.
I coped with this situation ok because you could still detach toolbars, so long as you docked them to another edge of the screen. Here's how I had it while using XP and Vista (click to enlarge).
This is on my second monitor, so my Taskbar isn't visible.
Now some genius at Microsoft decided that in Windows 7, not only could you not float toolbars anymore, you couldn't remove them from the taskbar at all, even to dock them :) Good one, idiots. Now if I want to have all the folders on my personal directory displayed for easy single-click access, I need to keep the toolbar attached to the taskbar. The best compromise I could come up with was having the folders displaying alongside the taskbar icons and dock the whole stupid taskbar to the side of my second monitor.
After scouring the internet for ages, posting on forums, finding out people were having similar problems and almost giving up after having no luck, I finally found the ultimate solution! Its name is Desktop Sidebar.
Check out my desktop now!
It does everything I was looking for, and even more! It has hundreds of plugins, amazing quality skins, and it's free! I'm excited.
