Expand Your Taskbar to a Second Monitor With Free Zbar
At a Glance
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ZBar
This free, tiny, portable tool puts a taskbar on your secondary monitor, and lets you pick different wallpapers for every monitor.
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Over the years, Windows got much better at handling multiple monitors. Still, there are some basic things even Windows 7 can't do, such as placing a taskbar on each monitor, and having a different wallpaper for each monitor. For those, you would need a third-party utility, such as the excellent (but commercial) DisplayFusion or UltraMon. Then again, you could always try ZBar, a tiny and free tool that lets you give each desktop its own wallpaper and taskbar.

As soon as you run ZBar, a new taskbar appears on the secondary monitor. Unlike in DisplayFusion, the new taskbar looks nothing like the default Windows 7 taskbar--it's a blast from the past, and strongly reminiscent of the Windows NT 4 taskbar. Fortunately, you can right-click ZBar's system tray icon and change its appearance, making the taskbar taller, the icons larger, and removing the text, thus ending up with something that looks much closer to the Windows 7 taskbar. If you don't want to tweak individual settings, you can just pick one of the four included presets, and have settings applied in bulk. Amusingly, one of the presets is MacOS 10.4, but it doesn't really create a dock (you'd need something like ObjectDock for that).

The secondary taskbar doesn't contain a system tray, nor does it have its own Start button. It features an icon for every application running on its monitor, as well as an optional date and time displayed on the right-hand side. Clicking the clock pops up one of ZBar's coolest features: A six-month calendar, much nicer than the single-month calendar Windows uses.

For a download that weighs less than 150KB--and costs nothing--ZBar gets an awful lot done. It is fast, functional, and lean. If you've been looking for a secondary taskbar that won't weigh your system down, try ZBar.
--Erez Zukerman












