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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
April 12, 2009
Q.
Why do some Start Menus have options like
Run, Printers, Network etc., and others do
not. Can these items be added or removed?
A.
Most Start Menu items are editable. When
Windows is installed, many of these items
are not displayed by default possibly to
keep the menu from being bloated. Depending
on your resolution and the number of items
you choose to be displayed, there is a
possibility that they may not all have room
to display.
However,
this takes a very low resolution and lot of
selected items to occur. To me, Microsoft
chooses to display items that I believe to
be non-essential while not displaying items
that I consider absolutely necessary.
To modify
these Start menu items, the process is
similar with XP or Vista although the items
available to display do differ a little from
version to version. To see the list of
available items, right click a blank spot on
the taskbar, choose Properties, Start Menu,
then the Customize button. In XP there is
one more step, click the Advanced tab. This
dialog will appear. Both XP and Vista are
shown.
In Vista,
the Advanced tab has been eliminated and the
items shown on the General tab in XP are
merged into just one dialog in Vista. Note
too that Vista gives you a choice to return
everything to the default settings, that is
what they were set to when Vista was
installed. These choices and the dialog
itself are slightly different in Windows 7,
but that it is for another time.
In this
dialog, you can choose the items that will
or will not be displayed in the Start Menu.
Manu of the items have choices as to what
the item is linked to. e.g. The Documents or
Pictures items can be displayed as links or
menus. Some of the items not displayed by
default that I feel are desirable are Run,
Printers, Networks Connections as a link.
You may have other favorites.
Some of
these items can also be selected by using
keyboard hotkeys which may be easier than
using the mouse. e.g. to open the Run
command, just press the Windows Logo key+R.
To see other possible keyboard hot keys,
click on "Shortcut Keys" in the Topics menu
on the left side of this page. |
