1. First, right-click on the taskbar and turn off "Lock the Taskbar."
2. Right-click the taskbar, hover over Toolbars, and select New Toolbar.
3. When it asks you to select a folder, enter this string: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
4. Find Quick Launch (it may be on the right side of the taskbar), right-click the divider and disable "Show Text" and "Show Title." Make sure "Small Icons" is enabled.
5. Drag the divider to rearrange Quick Launch on your taskbar (using left-click).
6. Right-click and lock your toolbar again.

You're welcome. I love you too. [MaximumPC]

View our other Windows 7 tips and our continuing coverage here.

Two caveats to this. One, you shouldn't interrupt a backup that's in place, because that results in a corrupt backup. It's fine if you perform another backup right after to make a correct one, but what if you forget and try and restore? It's phone corruption time. Two, using this method means you will not have a phone backup. Yeah, seriously. You won't have anything to restore from, so you'll have to go in naked the next time something's broken with your OS. Now that you know what the risks are, here's how you do it:

This command will change a hidden setting in the iTunes preferences that will force it to skip the backup process.

1. - Quit iTunes.

2. - Open Terminal.app

3. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

4. - Open iTunes

5. - Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don't have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the 'true' in step 3 to 'false' will re-enable the backup feature.

[Zerologic]

At the bottom of each post you'll see a "Login with your username and password below. New User? Here's what to do." Since you're obviously a new user, click that link and follow the instructions below to choose a username, a password and an optional email address.

Once your comment is approved, it'll show up and you can come back and keep refreshing to see if someone else has responded to your comment. How very vain of you.

If you're still having problems, check out the commenting FAQ. – Jason Chen

Long story short (cutting out the technical details because we've forgotten everything we learned in our computer science lectures), if you're running a 32-bit operating system, you will only be able to address 32-bits of memory at a time. Multiply that out and you get 4GB, but when you take into consideration the memory reserved for video RAM and bios space, you won't be able to hit all 4GB.

Point being? Get 3GB and you should do fine. Either that, or get a 64-bit operating system. – Jason Chen

Dude, Where's My 4 Gigabytes of RAM? [Coding Horror via Digg]

Once you do, you leave your computer with them and within a day or two you'll get a call from a Genius with the diagnosis and a quote (which is often $0 if you're under AppleCare). Not a bad way to get your Mac repaired if you have to work all day and can't make it in to a Genius appointment. – Jason Chen

Don't Wait For A Genius: Quick Drop Your Mac And Go [Consumerist]

Tip of the Day
Like to use bold, italics or underline? You can do it in your comments. Some of you crazy folks may even try all three! For bold, simply slap <b> and </b> around whatever you want bolded. The same applies for italics and underline (<i> </i> , <u> </u>). Don't forget to close your tags, though. Or we will bust out the ban hammer.

Check out our other tips here.

Tip of the day:
Your login you get for Gizmodo's comments works just as well on all of Gawker's other sites. For example, you can leave comments at lifehacker, kotaku, consumerist, and valleywag, saying how Melissa Mayer ripped you off on Craigslist for a PS3 she was getting rid of to make herself more productive.

Don't miss our other commenting tips.

Shirt available at Thinkgeek

Tip of the Day:
Once you do have a comment account, you can go in and change your avatar so everyone can easily recognize (and skip over) your comments. Just scroll to the comment area of a post and click "Edit My User Profile", then feel free to upload a picture at or less than 160x160 pixels. It helps if you use something representative of yourself—me, you can probably guess which one I have.

Don't miss our other commenting tips.

By using this instead of just holding down the play/pause button, you'll lose the ability to start up again exactly where you left off, plus you'll have to watch the Zune startup logo again, but you save some battery life. – Jason Chen

A simple trick for extending Zune battery life [Zunerama]

Retailers profit from unused gift cards [Yahoo via Digg]

Mac OS Rumors says an Apple insider and long-time regular tipster of theirs has told them the next version of the Mac OS X, 10.5, will have a BitTorrent client built-in:

"Leopard" will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth. ...Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.

Mac OS Rumors doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to accuracy, and so we pretty much think this is crazy talk, but Slashdot poster richdun does have a good theory on why this might be smart thing for Apple to do:

Credit for torrenting? Why would Apple give away iTunes music just for people to run torrents? Well, maybe because those torrents will serve up iTunes movies. Dedicated bandwidth has been the greatest obstacle to getting a full iTunes HD movie store (well, that and the movie companies' agreement, but if the tech is there and economical, the content will follow).

Would you participate in this if it actually happened? We have to admit we'd happily donate some of our upstream bandwidth in exchange for iTunes store credits, so we could buy our favorite episodes of Law & Order without feeling too guilty about paying for something we can catch on TNT almost every single day—or at least we would until ISPs caught on and started charging by bandwidth instead of flat unlimited rates.

Photo by Marty DeAngelo

10.5 "Leopard" to employ a system-level, encrypted BitTorrent client and a sharing-reward system? [Mac OS Rumors, via Slashdot]