Question:  “All my buttons and tabs have disappeared in Task Manager! I can’t change tabs and there is no red X to close it. Is there any way I can fix this without reinstalling Windows?”

“First off don’t panic! You’re just in Tiny Footprint Mode! “ There is nothing wrong with your install of Windows to cause this – you have just accidentally put Task Manager into ‘Tiny Footprint Mode’ which hides all the buttons and tabs.

This one foxes a lot of people who think they’ve done something disastrous to their computer!    It’s actually a handy built-in monitor put there for anyone who wants to be able to track their computer’s performance eg. while playing a game, without the buttons and tabs.  However, for anyone who does this accidentally it can be very disturbing and because it’s Task Manager they automatically think something must be wrong with [tag]Windows[/tag]!

The way to switch to Tiny Footprint Mode is to double click anywhere below the Menu bar eg. on the plain background.  This is  probably what you did to accidentally get into this mode!

 (click for larger image) 

To get out of Tiny Footprint Mode double-click anywhere on the plain background and your buttons and tabs will reappear.

(FYI – Tiny Footprint Mode is the same in Vista too.)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Windows. Both comments and pings are currently closed.