Taskbar Eliminator is an application that can be used to hide the Windows taskbar so that you can use any docking application or to free up more desktop space more easily. The functionality of the software can also be considered to help protect your privacy by not revealing your opened programs to anyone who looks at your screen. The program works fine, but it’s made to do only one thing, and it’s not very intuitive the first time out.

Once you have installed Taskbar Eliminator, your taskbar will disappear immediately, which can be pretty confusing. All you need to do to get it back is hit Alt + T – the hotkey for toggling the taskbar.

The program’s interface is sparse, and even worse, there’s no way to know how to access it without reading the publisher’s description. We find this a pretty major failing; a program should at least be able to explain for itself how it should be accessed. Instead, the program hid our Taskbar immediately upon extraction, leaving us scrambling for the publisher’s description to find out how to control it. It turns out that the program is controlled with simple keyboard shortcuts, which is nice. The program’s interface is practically useless, with buttons for hiding and unhiding the Taskbar and allowing users to determine whether they want to the program to start with Windows. That’s really all there is to it; there’s no Help file or other features or options. Although the program was easy to use and worked just fine once we figured it out, we were really disappointed by how unintuitive it was to start with.

Taskbar Eliminator’s talents end there. Right clicking on the Taskbar Eliminator icon in the system tray will bring up a supremely simple options menu – hide or show the taskbar and whether or not to start up with Windows. Taskbar Eliminator is free. It comes as a ZIP file and runs after extraction with no need for installation. We recommend this program with reservations; it functions well but lacks features, and is not user friendly to start. So why might you want to use Taskbar Eliminator? Well, it provides more space for you to work, for using certain dockable applications or simply for security reasons. Sure, it’s very, very simple, but it does its job flawlessly and quickly.