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The news comes from a website called “Rafael’s Within Windows” with Rafael saying: “During PDC ‘08, I was passed a note indicating that I should dig deeper into the bits to discover the snazzy new Taskbar. Upon cursory analysis, I found no evidence of such and dismissed the idea as completely bogus.
“I got home and starting doing some research on a potentially new feature called Aero Shake when I stumbled upon an elaborate set of checks tied to various shell-related components, including the new Taskbar.
“Update: Although a newer-looking Taskbar is present, it’s not exactly what you saw at PDC ‘08. For example, the Quicklaunch toolbar still exists, Aero Peek doesn’t work properly, and Jumplists are stale. This is likely why it wasn’t enabled, out of the box, so set your expectations accordingly.”
Rafael explains a complicated process Microsoft has put in place to ensure that only its own employees on a Microsoft domain can enable this feature, and then explains how to bypass it.
Even better, Rafael has written a little program and posted instructions on enabling the superbar in build 6801 in just a couple of minutes.
The Neowin site linked above explains that you need to be in the C:\Windows directory, and not C:\Windows\System32, and has five pages of comments from excited users who have made the superbar work, and who claim that despite Rafael’s warnings it really does look and work in a very similar fashion to what was seen in the PDC demos.
The Within Windows site linked above has the download in question for x86 and x64 (although he cautions the x64 version is untested) along with instructions on making it all happen.
Other news on the Internet suggests that the free AVG anti-virus installs properly but the resident scanner doesn’t work, Norton Internet Security 2009 installs perfectly and seems to work but freezes Windows 7, while NOD32 and Avast free antivirus work perfectly within Windows 7.
So, if you’ve got Windows 7 pre-beta 6801 and want to see the new taskbar for yourself, and/or protect yourself with antivirus software, now you know how!
