Add controls to Windows Explorer

Launch a web browser, click once in the Address bar to highlight what’s there and replace it by typing www.xtrabuttons.com. Press Enter. When the website loads, click the big Download button. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and then choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now locate and double-click the downloaded file to begin the installation. Work through installation wizard, accepting the licence agreement and the default settings. At the end, click Finish.

Extrabuttons doesn’t launch automatically, so click Start, point to All Programs followed by eXtraButtons and then click eXtraButtons to launch it. Nothing obvious will happen, but the next time a window is opened you’ll see a row of nine buttons have been added to the title bar – so launch an application or open any folder. We’ll look at each one in turn and explain how and when you can use them.

Starting from the left, the first two buttons do similar things. The first, a down-pointing diagonal arrow, minimises the selected window to the Notification Area and labels it with the associated program icon. The second – a right-pointing arrow – minimises the current window to the Extrabuttons icon in the Notification Area (from whence it can be restored by right-clicking the Extrabuttons icon, pointing to Show Trayed Windows and choosing the minimised window from the pop-up menu). This second option is useful on smaller screens. Here, we’ve got five windows minimised to the Notification Area.

Click the third button along (five dots) and the current window will be minimised to an icon and ‘parked’ at the edge of the screen. Do the same with a few windows until you’ve got several in the same position: here, we’ve parked Wordpad and Paint alongside three folders. With at least four icons in position, right-click on any one of them and choose Arrange Boxes from the pop-up menu. Now, icons will ‘snap’ to the various edges of the screen. Reinstate windows by double-clicking their icon.

The fourth button is an up-pointing arrow with a horizontal line: a click on this will ‘roll’ windows up and down, so that only their title bars are visible. This is a handy way of hiding a window while you’re momentarily working on something else. To reinstate the window to full size, click the button again.

Alternatively, you might want to keep a particular window visible all the time. In this case, click the fifth button from the left – it looks like a pushpin – to ‘pin’ the window on top of everything else. Activating the pushpin on two or more windows will keep those on top of all other windows, while still allowing you to switch between them normally. The next button along, incidentally, does the opposite; click it to send the current window to the bottom of the pile.

The next two buttons – a dotted rectangle and a dotted rectangle with a percentage sign in the middle – control the transparency of the current window. The first makes the window transparent based on the default setting (see the Options dialogue box in Step 9). The second opens a menu that lets you to pick a transparency percentage on the fly and assign it to the active window.

Clicking the final button will make a copy of the current folder or application window. This would normally entail use of Windows Explorer or navigating through the Start menu to launch a second instance of a program. Here, for instance, we’ve used the button to launch a second instance of Windows’ Paint program.

The buttons on the Extrabuttons bar can be customised. Right-click the Extrabuttons icon in the Notification Area and choose Options from the pop-up menu. In the Options dialogue box, click Buttons Set in the left-hand column and then use the controls in the right-hand column to add or remove buttons or re-order them by dragging and dropping. It’s also worth clicking the individual entries under the Button settings headings: it’s possible, for example, to assign shortcut keys to each button.

Some programs don’t like Extrabuttons. If you experience problems, Extrabuttons can be instructed to ignore particular programs. Open the Options dialogue box as before and click the Exclude applications link on the left. Now click the Add button and use Windows Explorer to navigate to where the program is stored (typically this will be in C:\Program Files), select it and click Open. Here we’ve added Word 2007. Click OK to finish.