I've been looking at the Taskbar on my Windows 7 system pretty closely and realize that a lot of the icons shown are useless and just take up space. Prime example: The little speaker icon that lets me change audio output volume. But I have a "volume up" and "volume down" button on my computer, so why do I need that? Can I remove some of these stupid icons?

My friend has a Windows PC with a big screen and his taskbar is double height and full of icons for his favorite apps. Very cool. How can I customize my own Windows taskbar and change what programs or apps are shown?

I'm confused: It used to be that when I closed windows -- really, minimized windows -- in Windows 7 that they'd show up as a tab along the bottom in the Taskbar. Now, however, a lot of them just vanish. They're still there, the app's still running, but the Taskbar is all too often empty. What happened to my Win7 programs?

I have installed Google Chrome and did not choose the quick launch. But now i find it nice and how do i set the quick launch (without reinstallation)?