Programs, Default Programs and Windows Upates. Right click on the Programs and, from the drop down menu, click Paste.

A message will appear telling you that you need adminstartive permissions to make the changes. If you are the administrator, click the Continue button. Now take a look in the All Programs and you should see the entry for Windows Media Player back where it originally was. This forum post is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or view of Microsoft, its employees, or other MVPs. Simply click one or press the down arrow to highlight the one you want, and then press Enter to go to that site.

In fact, for many people, the idea of making it look or work differently comes dangerously close to nerd territory. Still, knowing how to manipulate the Start menu listings may come in handy someday, and provides an interesting glimpse into the way Windows works. And tweaking it to reflect your way of doing things can pay off in efficiency down the road.

Thanks to the User Accounts feature described in Chapter 23 , any changes you make to the Start menu apply only to you. Each person with an account on this PC has an independent, customized Start menu. When you sign onto the machine using your name and password, Windows Vista loads your customized Start menu. Microsoft offers a fascinating set of customization options for the Start menu. To view and change the basic options, right-click the Start menu; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties.

When you click the Customize button, you see the dialog box shown at right in Figure All of these items are things that can appear in the right-hand column of the Start menu. Just turn off the checkboxes of the items you consider clutter. How do I open the Control Panel window? Open the Start menu and then right-click Control Panel. Choose Open from the shortcut menu. Thereafter, you can use the Start menu to launch Internet Explorer and travel directly to the selected site.

Enable context menus and dragging and dropping. Turning on this checkbox has two benefits. First, it lets you customize your Start menu simply by dragging icons onto it, as described in the next section. Second, it lets you right-click Start-menu items, which produces a useful shortcut menu containing commands like Rename and Remove from This List. If this checkbox is turned off, right-clicking Start menu items has no effect.

Highlight newly installed programs. Whenever you or some techie in the building installs a new program into the Start menu, it shows up with colored highlighting for a few days.

The idea, of course, is to grab your attention and make you aware of your expanded software suite. If you could do without this kind of reminder, then just turn off this checkbox. The Add, Remove, and Advanced buttons, for example, let you add or remove any icons you like disks, folders, programs, documents to the top part of the Start menu for easy access.

Many checkboxes in the scrolling list match the options described on these pages. The rest either control which commands are listed in the menu checkboxes beginning with the word Display or turn certain commands into submenus checkboxes beginning with the word Expand. This is a very handy feature when applied to the Control Panel, for example. Finally, note the option called Use Personalized Menus.

When this checkbox is turned on, Windows watches you and studies your behavior that is, even more than usual. Some people find it disconcerting that Personalized Menus changes the Start menu frequently, making it difficult to get used to the positions of familiar items. Open submenus when I pause on them with the mouse pointer. Search communications , Search favorites and history , Search programs.

These checkboxes let you tell Vista which items you want searched whenever you use the new Search command. All your documents, for starters. Sort All Programs menu by name. All right, that was uncalled for; truth is, having the list in A-to-Z order can make life easier for just about anyone. If you opt to turn off this option, you can always make the All Programs list snap into alphabetical order on your command, as described in the Tip on Section 1.

Use large icons. Bigger icons are pretty, but of course they limit the number of items the list can hold. Below the massive list of checkboxes, two additional controls await in the Customize dialog box:.

Number of recent programs to display. By increasing this number, you make the Start menu taller—but you ensure that more of your favorite programs are listed and ready to launch. Internet link, E-mail link. Use these checkboxes and pop-up menus to specify whether or not you want your Web browser and email program listed at the top of the left-hand Start menu column—and if so, which ones.

Use Default Settings. There may be times, however, when you want to add something to the Start menu yourself, such as a folder, document, or even a disk.

These are the two areas that you, the lowly human, are allowed to modify freely—adding, removing, renaming, or sorting as you see fit:. The top-left section of the Start menu. This little area lists what Microsoft calls pinned programs and files—things you use often enough that you want a fairly permanent list of them at your fingertips. The All Programs menu. This, of course, is the master list of programs and anything else—documents, folders, disks—you want to see listed. These two legal areas are highlighted back in Figure Locate the icon you want to add to your Start menu.

Adding disks and folders to the Start menu is especially handy, because it lets you dive directly into their contents without having to drill down through the Computer window. Adding an application name to your All Programs menu requires that you find the program file , as described on Section 1.

To do so, either use the Search command described in Chapter 3 , or just dig around for it in any Explorer window. Drag it directly onto the Start button. Alternatively, if you keep the mouse button pressed as you drag onto the Start button, the Start menu itself opens. As long as the button is still pressed, you can drag the new icon wherever you want among the items listed in the top-left section of the menu Figure , left.

If you want to restore some order to it—specifically, alphabetical—just right-click anywhere on the open All Programs menu and choose Sort by Name from the shortcut menu. Right-click the Start button; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties; and use the Add, Remove, and Sort buttons.

Windows Vista builds the All Programs menu by consulting the contents of two critical folders:. This folder contains shortcuts for programs that are available to everybody who has an account on your machine Chapter This invisible folder stashes shortcuts for the programs that you have added to the Start menu—and they appear only when you have logged into the machine.

Therefore, instead of the fancy icon-adding wizards and drag-and-drop schemes described above, you may prefer to fine-tune your Start menu the low-tech way. See Figure When it comes time to prune an overgrown Start menu, there are three different sets of instructions, depending on which section of the Start menu needs purging. The left-side column and All Programs list. The right-side column.

You can spawn instant shortcuts Section 3. Click the Start menu to open it, right-click the command you want to rename, and choose Rename from the shortcut menu. The name of the command sprouts a little editing box. Type the new name and then press Enter. As you drag an item, a black line appears to show you the resulting location of your dragging action.

Release the mouse when the black line is where you want the relocated icon to appear. As noted earlier, some of the items in the All Programs list are actually folders.

For example, clicking Games reveals a submenu that lists all the games that come with Windows see Figure In past Windows versions, clicking such folders made them sprout submenus , some of which had submenus of their own, and on and on. In Vista, folders no longer expand horizontally that way—they expand vertically, as shown in Figure Right-click the Start menu button.

From the shortcut menu, choose Explore. The subfolders you are about to create in the All Programs menu will show up only when you are logged on. If you want to make a change that affects everybody with an account on this computer, choose Explore All Users from the shortcut menu instead.

Its contents are arrayed before you, as shown in Figure When the new folder appears, type a folder name and then press Enter. Just double-click to open any of the existing folders in the Programs folder, and then repeat from step 3. Now you can put your favorite file, folder, disk, or application icons into this new folder.

Skip to main content. Start your free trial. Chapter 1. Welcome Center, Desktop, and the Start Menu. Figure The Welcome Center, new in Windows Vista, offers links to various useful corners of the operating system.

Most are designed to help you set up a new PC. Click once to read a description, and then double-click to open the link. The Welcome Center. The Vista Desktop—Now with Aero! A new, bigger, more modern font is used for menus and labels. Tip Windows Vista also includes all-new sounds, too—the little blips and bleeps you hear when you wake up or shut down the PC, get an error message, and so on. The only truly new element is the Sidebar, the stack of small floating windows that appears at the right side of the screen.

Chapter 6 covers the Sidebar in detail. The Start Menu. The lower-left section lists programs you use most often. You can delete individual items here—see Section 1.

As you move the selection down the list, if you move to an item in a different group, such as Files, then Jaws reads the name of the group. You can open items in the other groups in a similar manner. However, for reasons possibly known by Microsoft, if the first item in the list of results is either in the File or Communications group, then the Search Everywhere link is automatically selected, rather than the first item, and Jaws indicates this by saying unselected after it has read the first item.

So in this case you have to press Down Arrow three times to move the selection to the first item in the list. The All Programs menu contains all the programs which have been installed on the computer by either you or the company who build the PC, together with some programs which are part of Windows.

Once you've selected the All Programs sub menu, you can open it by pressing either Enter or Right Arrow. This menu opens as a tree view, rather than a conventional menu, and it temporarily replaces the pinned and most frequently used programs in the Start menu. In addition, a Back sub menu item temporarily replaces the All Programs sub menu item.

So, when the All Programs menu is open, the left hand column of the Start menu consists of:. The top level of the tree view consists of an number of individual programs, followed by a number of folders. A folder contains a number of items which have been grouped together, and is the equivalent of a sub menu in a conventional menu. For example, the Accessories folder contains programs such as Notepad, and Calculator.

As with any list or tree view, you can use Up Arrow and Down Arrow , Home and End , and the first character or characters of an item. Note that you can move to all the items in the left hand column using Up Arrow and Down Arrow. So if you're on the first item in the tree view, pressing Up Arrow will take you to the Start Search box, and if you're on the last item, then pressing Down Arrow move you to the Back sub menu.

The toolbar at the bottom of the right hand column contains the Power button, and the Lock button, and a menu button which automatically opens when you select it.

There are a couple of things to note about the Power button, which is the first button in the toolbar. Firstly, after installing Vista this button is a Sleep button, but you can change it so that it's a Shutdown button as described in the Power button section.

Secondly, for some Windows updates, the computer needs to shutdown. However this option does not appear on the menu. So if you normally shutdown the computer when you're finished with it for the day, then if you've changed the sleep button to a shutdown button, and use that button to shutdown, then you'll be aware of these updates that need installing.

Alternatively, if you prefer to use the menu to shutdown, then on your way to the menu, pause on a regular basis to check it there are any updates that need installing. An alternative to using the Start menu for shutdown, sleep, etc is to use the Shut Down Windows dialog box.

The first control in the dialog is a combo box which contains all the options for shutdown, sleep, etc. By default, the first two pinned programs are your default web browser and your default email programs.

If you need to change these items, then this is described in the Internet and E-mail programs section below. In addition to these, you may want to add all the programs you regularly use to the pinned programs. The Power button, which is the first button in the toolbar, is a Sleep button by default. However, you can change it to be a Shutdown button as follows:. The Customize Start menu dialog contains controls for setting various options. This section describes how to open and close this dialog, and the following sections describe the various options.

By default, the number of most frequently used programs shown is 9. Some people prefer to set this to zero, and just used the pinned programs which don't change unless you change them. When you use the Start Search edit box, then by default four groups of items are searched: Programs, Favorites and history, Files, and Communications.

However, you can choose which groups of items are searched in the Customize Start Menu dialog which was described above. The tree view, which is the first control, contains the following relevant items:. You can customize the group of items in the right hand column, which normally begins with your personal folder, using the tree view in the Customize Start Menu dialog , which was described above.

For some menu items, there is just an option as to whether they're displayed or not. For these items, there's a check box in the tree view. For other items, there are more options, and for these the item in the tree view contains a group of radio buttons. There are three options for your personal folder, and the following folders which are contained in it: Documents, Pictures, Music, and Games. The options are:. The following items can be either displayed or not, and the default is shown in parenthesis after each item: Connect To on , Default Programs on , Favorites menu off , Help on , Network on , Printers off , Run command off.

Computer and Control Panel both have the same three options as your personal folders above, and the default is Display as link. Finally, System administrative tools has three options, and the default is that it's not displayed. Normally, the first two pinned programs at the top of the left hand column are your default web browser and email program.

If you change which program is your default web browser or email program then these items are automatically updated. However, if you accidentally remove one of these from the menu and want to restore it, or you want to change either of these programs, then you can do this in the Customize Start Menu dialog , which was described above. In the Show on Start menu section of this dialog, there's an Internet link check box followed by a combo box, and an E-mail link check box followed by a combo box.

It's all logical. It worked great. But here's the problem. Classics View let me do that once, but now as I update programs, like I just did to Adobe Reader 9, it puts the shortcut at the top of the list, and it won't let me drag it into the folder I want, or customize in any other way.

Why not? To me, customizing is not just clicking a list of whether to display something or not. It's to organize it logically the way you want it.

When I go back to the Classics menu, it doesn't show the Adobe Reader 9, or some of the other utilties that have been added to the Program list, and show up when I go to "All Programs" but are no where to be found when I go back to the Classics menu-Customize-Advanced option to customize the folders.