In issue #127 I showed how you can use the Quick Launch Toolbar to reduce the number of icons on your desktop.

It was a simple technique that entailed the creation of categorized folders in the Toolbar and then moving desktop icons into the appropriate folders.

Using the technique you can dramatically reduce the number of icons on your desktop thus making everything quicker to find.

You can apply a similar technique to the Windows Start Menu.

Many users have very long start menus, often with dozens of items in the "All Programs" listing. Some can be so long they even run off the screen.

This needn't be so; it's reasonably simple to organize the "All Programs" section of the Start Menu into your own category folders. Here's how:

Right-click on the Start Menu then click Explore. This will open Windows Explorer within the start menu folder for the current user. If you then click "Programs" on the left hand pane you should see all the programs for the current user listed in your Start Menu.

These names are, for the most part, in one big list. What we want to do is create some category folders then move individual programs into those folders.

The categories you create are up to you. I created three: security, maintenance and utilities. These are the same categories I use for my Quick Launch Menu. Keeping them the same makes my filing consistent.

To create the folders, right click in the any white space in the right hand Explorer pane and select New/Folder. Name your folder appropriately, for example "Security."

Then just drag and drop the appropriate programs into the folder you have created. In my case I moved NOD32, Ewido, SpySweeper and seven other programs into the "Security" folder.

Repeat this procedure for other category folders you want to create. That completes the job for the Start Menu for the current user.

At this stage you may have noticed that some of the programs listed when you hit "All Programs" from the Windows Start Menu are missing from the start menu folder. That's because these programs have been installed for all users not just the current user.

To locate these programs, navigate using the left hand Windows Explorer pane to the start menu folder listed under "All Users." Repeat the procedure of creating folders and moving programs making sure you create the exact same folder names as you did for the current user start menu folder.

When completed, click the Windows Start Menu button in the lower left hand side of your screen and you will see all your new category folders at the end of the All Programs list. Click any folder and you'll see the programs you moved to each folder.

It's a good idea to move these category folders to the top of your Start Menu. You can do this simply by dragging and dropping the folders from within the "All Programs" listing.

You may also want to change the folder icons to something a bit different to the other folders in your "All Programs" list. You can do this by right-clicking on each category folder and selecting Properties / Customize / Change icon, then selecting your icon and pressing Apply.

In the end you'll end up with a Start Menu "All Programs" listing with far fewer items together with a series of category folders. Finding programs using this system is way quicker than selecting from a long list.

If sorting out your Start Menu this way sounds a little daunting, don't worry; there's a free utility that will do it for you more simply. It's called Tidy Start Menu and you can get it here:

http://www.tidystartmenu.com/index.shtml (0.98MB)

There's a free and a paid version but the free will do the job just fine. The main restriction in the free version is that the categories folders are pre-defined rather than user selectable. You can, however, just access the Start Menu folder using the method above and re-name the categories to whatever you want. But hey, I didn't tell you that did I?

Gizmo, November 2006.

Ian "Gizmo" Richards
Editor
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