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| Start Menu |
e
central location for your application shortcuts and many Windows
features.
To Open
Desktop
StartPress the Windows logo key, if you've got oneCtrl-EscThe Start menu was one of Microsoft's answers to the
growing size and complexity of the Windows operating system when it
was introduced in Windows 95. Since then, other features have been
introduced to compensate for the Start menu's
inadequacies, such as the QuickLaunch toolbar and the new Windows
XP-style Start menu. (See the discussion of "Style" at the beginning of this
chapter.)Here is a quick rundown of the items you'll find in
the Start menu. Note that some of these
items may be hidden as a result of settings described in Figure 3-27.)
Figure 3-29. Start menu items can be rearranged by dragging and dropping
While the Desktop is commonly used to hold icons for the most
frequently used programs, the Programs menu (or All Programs menu,
with the new Windows XP-style Start menu) is designed to hold icons
for every program installed on your computer. See "Shortcuts", earlier in this chapter,
for details.
Programs (or All Programs)
Startup
To have a program run automatically when Windows starts, place a
shortcut to the program in this special folder. If you have more than
one user set up on your computer, you'll want to
control whether the program starts up automatically for just you or
for all users, so instead of dropping it right in your Start menu,
open Explorer and navigate to either \Documents and
Settings\{username}\Start Menu\Programs\Startup or
\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start
Menu\Programs\Startup.
Documents
The Documents menu is a list of automatically
generated links to the last dozen or so documents that were opened.
Click the links to open the documents in their default applications.The shortcuts in this menu are stored in the \Documents and
Settings\{username}\Recent folder. To clear this menu,
delete the shortcuts in the Recent folder, or go to Control Panel
Taskbar and Start Menu Start Menu tab Customize, and clickClear (or Clear List, if you're using the Windows
XP-style Start menu).For security reasons, you may wish to disable this menu; see Appendix D for information on TweakUI, which has a
feature to clear this list every time Windows is shut down, or even
to hide the Documents menu entirely.
Favorites
This is a mirror of the current user's Favorites
folder (\Documents and
Settings\{username}\Favorites) and the All
Users' Favorites folder (\Documents and
Settings\All Users\Favorites). Although this is the same
menu you'll see in Windows Explorer and Internet
Explorer, the shortcuts in this menu will launch whatever browser is
currently registered as the default.
Internet, Email (Windows XP-style Start menu only)
These two items are user-customizable links to your favorite web
browser and email program, respectively. By default,
they're set to Internet Explorer and Outlook
Express, but can be replaced with any programs properly registered as
web browsers and email clients. See Chapter 5
for details on choosing your own programs here.
Shut Down
See "Shut Down", earlier in this
chapter.
Log Off
See "Log Off", earlier in this
chapter.
Run
See "Run", earlier in this
chapter.
Search
See "Windows Explorer" in Chapter 4.
Settings (classic Start menu only) or Control Panel (Windows XP-style Start menu only)
See "Control Panel" in Chapter 4.
Notes
- If you want to place a new
shortcut
in your Start menu, remove an existing shortcut from your Start menu,
or rearrange your Start menu shortcuts, you can drag-drop shortcuts
in your Start menu almost as easily as you can in Explorer or on your
Desktop. When you start dragging, an insertion line will appear where
you can drop the shortcut; if the mouse pointer changes to a circle
with a line through it, you're over a portion of the
Start menu that can't be customized. To drag new
shortcuts into the Start menu, start dragging and hover the mouse
cursor over the Start button for a second or two; it will open
automatically, allowing you to complete your drag. Finally, you can
right-click any shortcut in your Start menu, allowing you to delete
it, change its properties, or even rename it in place. I frequently
use this feature to make certain application shortcuts more
accessible by placing items on the Desktop that otherwise would be
buried many menus deep. - When you first install Windows XP, the shortcuts in your Start menu
will be sorted alphabetically. Any subsequent items added to your
Start menu will appear at the end of the menu, and will not be sorted
automatically. To sort any single menu, right-click on one of its
entries and select Sort by Name. To sort all folders in your Start
menu, go to Control Panel
Taskbar and Start Menu
Start Menu tab Classic
Start menu Customize, and
click Sort. (Note that this feature is only available in the
Customize dialog for the Classic Start menu, so if
you're using the new Windows XP-style menu,
you'll need to temporarily switch to the classic
menu to sort all the folders at once. (See Chapter 8 for another solution.) - You can also add programs and folders to the top level
of the Start menu by dragging and dropping their icons onto the Start
button, or by waiting until the Start menu is open and then dropping
items onto the space above the built-in entries (see Figure 3-28).Figure 3-30. Drag and drop items in your Start menu to re-order or reorganize them in place
Settings\{username}\Start Menu folder, as opposed to
\Documents and Settings\{username}\Programs. You
should do this only for programs that you use fairly often. Good
programs to add there might be the Explorer and the Command Prompt
(DOS). Adding folders at this level is a great way of organizing all
of your programs into categories. Once you have created new folders,
you can move the program shortcuts from the Start Menu Programs folders into
your own folders and leave all the other shortcuts (uninstalls,
readmes, etc.) behind. - By default, dragging any files or other objects directly into the
Start menu will create shortcuts to those items, which is
inconsistent with the way Windows handles drag-drop elsewhere (see
Chapter 2). If you're dragging
an existing shortcut or a folder full of shortcuts into the Start
menu, hold the Shift key to force Windows to move (or the Ctrl key to
copy) the items, rather than create shortcuts to them. - Start Programs
can get fairly cluttered, since most
programs add shortcuts to this menu as part of their installation
process. Don't be afraid to rearrange and
consolidate your shortcuts here; most of them are probably never used
anyway. - If you want programs in the Startup folder to run in a particular
order, instead of putting in shortcuts to each program, create a
single batch file (see Chapter 6) or a WSH
Script (see Chapter 9) that launches the
applications in the desired order. - To bypass the programs in the Startup folder, hold down the
Shift key while the system is booting.
Keep holding it down until the Desktop has completely loaded. - In addition to the Startup folder, there are other ways programs can
be configured to run at Startup. Services (see Chapter 4) lists many background programs that are
run, even if no user has logged on; the Startup folder, since
it's a per-user setting, launches programs only
after the user has logged in. Other locations include the Registry
key,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. - If you're migrating from Windows 95 or Windows NT
4.0, you may have become accustomed to the way menus are split into
multiple columns when there are too many shortcuts. In Windows 98/Me,
Windows 2000, and now Windows XP, the default is scrolling menus,
which tends to be awkward. This setting can be changed by going to
the Start menu, and then to Control Panel Taskbar and Start Menu Start Menu tab Customize and turning off
the Scroll Programs option.
(It's in the Advanced tab if you're
using the Windows XP-style Start menu.) - Shortcuts that appear in Start Programs and Start Favorites are saved for
the currently logged-on user, as noted several times throughout this
section. If you have more than one user configured on your machine
and you want any of these items to appear for all of those users (as
everyone may wish to use the installed word processor, for example),
open Explorer and navigate to the \Documents and
Settings folder. There's a folder for
each configured user, as well as an All Users folder, and a
Default
User folder (a template for subsequently added users). You may wish
to delegate shortcuts to these various folders, depending on their
use. Note that if a shortcut is listed in a user's
personal Start Menu folder as well as the All Users Start Menu
folder, it will appear twice in that user's Start
menu. The same goes for the Desktop and Send To folders (both
discussed earlier in this chapter).
