posted on Tuesday, April 03, 2007 10:30 PM
by
thomasswilliams
OT: My Start Menu as at April 2006
Scott Kuhl has put out the challenge to "Show us your Start Menu".
Mine is below. It's horribly mis-representative of what I run because a) I've used TweakUI to ensure that some programs never make it to the frequently used list, and b) because I'm training myself to use Launchy to run things from the keyboard rather than the mouse and Start Menu (I don't think running a program using Launchy makes it appear on the frequently-used programs list, but I'm not 100% sure).
Here's some points of interest from looking at my Start Menu screenshot:
- I'm running Windows XP (I don't believe there's even a timeframe for implementing Vista within the organisation I work in) with the Royale skin.
- I've opted for small icons on the Start Menu and a maximum of 14 program shortcuts, because I like to see more, and don't really care about nice 48x48 icons (especially since some of the programs I used didn't have 48x48 icons anyway).
- I run Maxthon - and have since MyIE days - but am looking at FireFox.
- I should probably remove "Photo Editor" from the pinned programs, I use Paint.NET for image editing now.
- I like having the Control Panel display as a menu.
- I don't like all the "My" shortcuts that normally inhabit the top-right section - I can get to the folders pointed to be these easily anyway as I always have at least one Windows Explorer instance open. In fact I have cleaned out most of the defaults on the right-hand side...how many times will I ever use "Set Program Access and Defaults"?
Looking at Scott's and my Start menu, I have a few questions that have never occured before. Why can't I make the whole thing wider (or at least the left pane)? Why doesn't text for long items wrap (when showing small icons)? And why can't I have a login picture, even though I'm on a domain?
Lastly, Scott, I'm jealous of your XP skin :-)
Tags: windows, start menu, programs