OK Microsoft, this is something that really irks me. I noticed that the icon on for the pretty Start Orb of Vista is cutoff, because it is too large for the taskbar. OK I am no UX genius here, but that not only does it look really bad it is bad for your overall experience. I am not just talking aesthetics here. I am talking about forcing your GPU to do something it doesn’t have to do by performing the infamous “non-rectangular clipping operation” when it overlaps a maximized window. I really noticed this in my older Tablet PC and an older laptop. I even experienced the same problem on a new spanking Ferrari laptop when I applied a simple workaround where I noticed that there a slight performance hit on applications responding slower when maximized than without applying this easy workaround.
My simple workaround was something I generally do on my Tablet PCs out of habit, but not my laptops by unlocking the taskbar and increasing the size of the Taskbar to 2 rows, then locking it again. And that was it. It is simple,but really shouldn’t have been overlooked or have to be done. I just wished I had found this when I had a chance when it was in beta and didn’t really notice this problem until I installed the RTM on my older Fujitsu Tablet PC and was running through my machinations of customization.
And the result of this work around – See, no clipping and the best thing is the GPU and performance are no longer taking a hit. I am wondering if Microsoft expects the average user to know this?
Written by Steven Hughes - Visit Website
