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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
September 6, 2009
Q.
At times my Send To menu takes 30 seconds or
longer to open. What is causing this and how
can I fix it?
A.
This can be caused by a couple things and
seems to be more prevalent in Vista and
Windows 7 than XP. One cause, the least
likely and also the easiest to fix, is
simply too many items there. To fix this,
open Explorer, and in the address/location
bar enter shell:sendto.
NOTE:
Explorer is what is opened when you click on
My Computer in XP or just Computer in Vista
or Win 7.
This will
open the Send To folder and you can remove
anything that you don't need or want there.
Since this is just a folder, you can add or
remove files from it just like any other
folder.
The other
much more likely reason for the slow opening
of the Send To folder is that Windows
automatically displays icons for all the
removable and mapped drives there. If any of
these drives is unavailable for whatever
reason when you try to access the Send To
menu, there will be a delay. The more
unavailable drives, the longer the delay as
Windows tries to access them.
Unfortunately, when you open the Send to
folder to edit it, as was done above, the
drive icons are not displayed so cannot be
removed like the unwanted other items. As
you probably already anticipated, it will
take a registry modification to remove them.
This change could be made with the Group
Policies Editor but this editor isn't
available in the home versions of XP or
Vista and won't be in Win 7 home versions
either. So, it has to be done manually or
with a little stand alone program.
To make
this manual addition you
will need to add a 32 bit DWORD value named
"NoDrivesInSendToMenu" to the
registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer and set its value
to 1. To restore the drives in the Send To
menu, just delete this key or set it to 0.
Since
editing the registry can cause serious
problems to Windows if not done correctly,
as usually, I have written a little program
that will make these registry modifications
for you safely. This program called "RemoveDrives-SendTo.exe"
can be downloaded from the Download section
of this site or by clicking
HERE. This
program can also be used to reverse the
changes.
This
registry tweak will remove all the drives
from the Send To menu. But suppose that you
want one or more drives there. The answer to
this is to just create a short cut to the
drive and place it in the Send To menu.
Here's how to do that.
Open
Explorer and enter shell:sendto in the
address/location bar to open the Send To
menu. Locate the drive you want in the Send
To menu in the left pane. If the drives and
folders are not displayed, then you may have
to click the little ^ up arrow located at
the lower left of the screen next to the
work "Folders".
When the
drive or folder that you want in the Send To
menu is located, RIGHT click on it and drag
it to the send To folder and release the
right click button. Be sure to select
"Create Shortcut Here" from the menu. You do
not want to actually copy or move the drive
or folder, just create a shortcut to it.
Once the
extra items have been removed and all drives
have been removed, the Send To menu will
open almost instantly, and it will now
contain only the items you have specifically
selected to be displayed. |
