Taskbar Control

Taskbar Control is a tiny and portable application made to toggle the Windows taskbar display via a global hotkey. It doesn't contain any other notable options or configuration settings.

This tool can be extremely useful to those who frequently access the Properties dialog of the taskbar to select and deselect the auto-hide option.

Since there is no setup pack involved, you can drop the program files anywhere on the disk and just click the executable to launch Taskbar Control. Otherwise, you can keep it stored on a USB flash drive to directly run it on any PC effortlessly. It shouldn't make any modifications to your Windows registry.

Once launched, Taskbar Control creates an icon in the system tray area and sits there silently while running, without interrupting your regular computer activity by showing balloon messages or playing audio alerts.

By opening the right-click menu of the tray icon, you can access the configuration panel to specify a key or combination of two or three keys for quickly hiding the system taskbar and making it visible again. It's available at a global level and can be later modified.

Unsurprisingly, it left a small footprint on system resources in our tests. No error dialogs popped up and it didn't hang or crash. The developer says that Taskbar Control is capable of eliminating even the 1-pixel line which is normally left visible by Windows when hiding the taskbar. However, it failed to do this in our evaluation and remained on screen throughout the app's runtime.

To conclude, Taskbar Control provides casual and power users alike with a fast and effective method to toggling the system taskbar's visibility: through a keyboard shortcut.