The lower-left section lists programs you use most often. The right column links to important Windows features and folders. Right: The All Programs menu replaces the left column of the Start menu, listing all your software. You can rearrange, add to, or delete items from this list. Click OK. See Jump Lists for details on creating, deleting, and working with jump lists.
At the very bottom is the All Programs list described below, plus the all-important Search box, which gets a whole chapter to itself Chapter 3. Right side dark. In general, the right side of the Start menu is devoted to listing important places on the computer: folders like Documents, Pictures, and Music; or special windows like Network, Control Panel, and Computer. At the bottom is the Shut Down button, which turns the PC off. Maybe Microsoft was tired of all the lawsuits from Fisher-Price.
This thing is awesome. The instant you pop open the Start menu, your insertion point blinks in the new Start Search box at the bottom of the menu Figure As you type, Windows winnows down the list of found items, letter by letter. In any case, Windows highlights the first item in the results. If not, you can click what you want to open, or use the arrow keys to walk down the list and then press Enter to open something. This search can find files, folders, programs, email messages, address book entries, calendar appointments, pictures, movies, PDF documents, music files, Web bookmarks, and Microsoft Office documents, among other things.
It also finds anything in the Start menu, making it a very quick way to pull up something without having to click through a bunch of submenus.
You can read the meaty details about search in Chapter 3. Clearly, Microsoft has abandoned the superimposed-menus effect of Windows XP. Rather than covering up the regularly scheduled Start menu, the All Programs list replaces it or at least the left-side column of it. You can restore the original left-side column by clicking Back at the bottom of the list or pressing the Esc key. Just for keyboard fanatics: Once the programs list is open, you can also choose anything in it without involving the mouse.
Then press Enter to seal the deal. It also houses a number of folders. Some of the commands that populated the Start menus of previous Windows versions no longer appear in the Start menu of Windows 7.
Microsoft is trying to make Windows look less overwhelming. Right-click the Start menu. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. These generally contain programs, uninstallers, instruction manuals, and other related junk.
Submenus, also known as cascading menus, have been largely eliminated from the Start menu. Instead, when you open something that contains other things—like a folder listed in the Start menu—you see its contents listed beneath, indented slightly, as shown in Figure Click the folder name again to collapse the sublisting.
Another set of folders is designed to trim down the Programs menu by consolidating related programs, like Games, Accessories little single-purpose programs , and Maintenance. Everything in these folders is described in Chapter 7. This folder contains programs that open automatically every time you start Windows.
This can be a very useful feature. For instance, if you check your email every morning, you may as well save yourself a few mouse clicks by putting your email program into the Startup folder. If you spend all day long word processing, you may as well put Microsoft Word in there. It can just as well be a document you consult every day. The Documents folder is a natural example. Of course, you may be interested in the Startup folder for a different reason: to stop some program from launching itself.
This is a particularly common syndrome if somebody else set up your PC. Some program seems to launch itself, unbidden, every time you turn the machine on. All kinds of programs dump components into this folder.
Over time, they can begin to slow down your computer. Deleting something. From the shortcut menu, choose Delete. Click Yes to send the icon to the Recycle Bin. Adding something. With the All Programs list open, right-click the Startup folder and, from the shortcut menu, choose Open.
Once its window is open, navigate to the disk, folder, program , or document icon you want to add. Navigating to your files and folders is described in the following chapters. Using the right mouse button, drag the icon directly into the Startup window, as shown in Figure When you release the button, a shortcut menu appears; from the shortcut menu, choose Create Shortcuts Here.
Here, a document from the Documents library is being added. You may also want to add a shortcut for the Documents library itself, which ensures that its window will be open and ready each time the computer starts up. The fancily redesigned Start menu has its charms, including its translucent look. But as we all know, change can be stressful.
In Windows Vista, you could return to the organization and design of the old, single-column Start menu. It was an option in the Start menu Properties dialog box. From now on, each time you turn on or restart your computer, the program, file, disk, or folder you dragged will open by itself.
As noted earlier, the left-hand Start menu column, the white column, is your launcher for program, files, and folders you use a lot. The right side, the dark column, contains links to important functions and places. As the box on this page makes clear, Windows keeps all your stuff—your files, folders, email, pictures, music, bookmarks, even settings and preferences—in one handy, central location: your Personal folder.
This folder bears your name, or whatever account name you typed when you installed Windows 7. As described in Chapter 23 , everyone with an account on your PC has a Personal folder.
Why did Microsoft bury my files in a folder three levels deep? Because Windows has been designed for computer sharing. Each person who uses the computer will turn on the machine to find his own separate desktop picture, set of files, Web bookmarks, font collection, and preference settings.
Like it or not, Windows considers you one of these people. But in its little software head, Windows still considers you an account holder, and stands ready to accommodate any others who should come along.
In any case, now you should see the importance of the Users folder in the main hard drive window. Inside are folders—the Personal folders—named for the people who use this PC. This is only the first of many examples in which Windows imposes a fairly rigid folder structure. Still, the approach has its advantages. By keeping such tight control over which files go where, Windows 7 keeps itself pure—and very, very stable.
Other operating systems known for their stability, including Mac OS X, work the same way. Furthermore, keeping all your stuff in a single folder makes it very easy for you to back up your work. It also makes life easier when you try to connect to your machine from elsewhere in the office over the network or elsewhere in the world over the Internet , as described in Chapters Chapter 26 and Chapter This command opens up your Documents folder, a very important folder indeed.
That principle makes navigation easy. You never have to wonder where you filed something, since all your stuff is sitting right there in Documents.
Microsoft assumes correctly that most people these days use their home computers for managing digital photos and music collections. As you can probably guess, the Pictures and Music folders are intended to house them—and these Start menu commands are quick ways to open them. In fact, whatever software came with your digital camera or MP3 player probably dumps your photos into, and sucks your music files out of, these folders automatically.
This item opens the Games folder, where Microsoft has stashed 11 computer games for your procrastination pleasure. You get only six in the Starter edition of Windows 7. The first time you open the Games folder, a message pops up to ask if you want to use the recommended update and folder settings.
If so, Windows will notify you when updates to your games are available; auto-download rating and genre details about your games; and, in certain folder views, show when you last played a game. The Computer command is the trunk lid, the doorway to every single shred of software on your machine. When you choose this command, a window opens to reveal icons that represent each disk drive or drive partition in your machine, as shown in Figure For example, by double-clicking your hard drive icon and then the various folders on it, you can eventually see the icons for every single file and folder on your computer.
When you select a disk icon, the Details pane if visible shows its capacity and amount of free space bottom. Details in Chapter This command is a shortcut to the Default Programs control panel. It has two functions:. Justice Department. Details are on Default Programs. To specify which program opens when you double-click a certain kind of document.
Details on Default Programs. Grizzled, longtime Windows veterans may want to note that this file-association function used to be called File Types, and it was in the Folder Options window. Once again, speed fans have an alternative to using the mouse—just press the F1 key to open the Help window.
Try it again after clicking the desktop. When you shut down, you have to wait for all your programs to close—and then the next morning, you have to reopen everything, reposition your windows, and get everything back the way you had it. What you should do is put your PC to sleep. Click the to see these commands. As shown in Figure , these are the options for finishing your work session:.
See Chapter But whatever you had running remains open behind the scenes. After the interloper is finished, you can log in again to find all your open programs and documents exactly as you left them.
How do you want to stop working today? Microsoft offers you six different ways. This command locks your computer—in essence, it throws a sheet of inch-thick steel over everything you were doing, hiding your screen from view. You can trigger this button entirely from the keyboard. The underlined letter in the word Lock lets you know that O is the shortcut key. This command quits all open programs, and then quits and restarts Windows again automatically.
In the olden days, Windows offered a command called Standby. This special state of PC consciousness reduced the amount of electricity the computer used, putting it in suspended animation until you used the mouse or keyboard to begin working again. Whatever programs or documents you were working on remained in memory.
When using a laptop on battery power, Standby was a real boon. When the flight attendant handed over your microwaved chicken teriyaki, you could take a break without closing all your programs or shutting down the computer. Unfortunately, there were two big problems with Standby, especially for laptops. First, the PC still drew a trickle of power this way. Second, drivers or programs sometimes interfered with Standby, so your laptop remained on even though it was closed inside your carrying case.
First, drivers and applications are no longer allowed to interrupt the Sleep process. No more Hot Laptop Syndrome. Second, the instant you put the computer to sleep, Windows quietly transfers a copy of everything in memory into an invisible file on the hard drive.
But it still keeps everything alive in memory—the battery provides a tiny trickle of power—in case you return to the laptop or desktop and want to dive back into work. If you do return soon, the next startup is lightning-fast. You control when this happens using the advanced power plan settings described in Chapter 8. Fortunately, Windows still has the hard drive copy of your work environment.
So now when you tap a key to wake the computer, you may have to wait 30 seconds or so—not as fast as 2 seconds, but certainly better than the 5 minutes it would take to start up, reopen all your programs, reposition your document windows, and so on.
You save power, you save time, and you risk no data loss. You can send a laptop to Sleep just by closing the lid. Hibernate equals the second phase of Sleep mode, in which your working world is saved to the hard drive. Waking the computer from Hibernate takes about 30 seconds. You can configure your computer to sleep or hibernate automatically after a period of inactivity, or to require a password to bring it out of hibernation. See Creating your own plan for details.
Shut down. Sleep is almost always better all the way around. The only exceptions have to do with hardware installation. Hit the key to open the Start menu. But there are even faster ways. If you have a laptop, just close the lid.
See Customize the Start menu layout on Windows For the Windows 10 version of this topic, see Customize the Windows 10 Start layout. Start layout customizations are configured with LayoutModification.
The Start menu is comprised of three sections: Pinned, All apps, and Recommended. Your LayoutModification. The section at the top of the Start menu is called the Pinned section. This section consists of pins arranged in a grid. The items in this section are a subset of all the apps installed on the PC; not all installed apps are included in this section by default.
The number of rows and items in this view are consistent across device panel sizes. While the initial view of this section displays 18 items, a user can use the pagination control to move through pages of additional pins.
The items in this section are a combination of Microsoft-defined apps, dynamically delivered apps, and OEM-configured items. After setting up their PC, users can add, move, or remove pins in this this section. If you pin fewer than four items in either of these sections, other Microsoft-defined apps will slide over to fill the space to maintain the same order. Any array elements beyond the first four will be ignored.
An item can only appear in the Pinned section once. It's not possible to pin an app in more than one location in this section, whether on the same page or on different pages. This appears when a user clicks on All apps in the upper-right corner of the Start menu. All Apps is a comprehensive list, in alphabetical order, of all installed apps. This is the section below the "Pinned" section. On first boot, the Get Started app from Microsoft will be pre-populated in this location.
An OEM can also pre-populate the section with a welcome or first run experience app that will stay pinned for up to seven days unless a customer removes it. Available customizations : One item in this section. You only need one LayoutModification. If you're pinning web links, you'll also need to create a LayoutModification.
This not only keeps the "Start Menu" order from being saved correctly, but overwrites any "Favorites Menu" sort order you may have had. EXE from trying to save the "Start Menu" sort order to the wrong registry key. I can only assume the same bug was carried over to Windows 7. Good luck trying to convince Microsoft that there is a problem. EXE writing to the wrong registry key. Hopefully someone will develop a tweak for this.
That would be the third one for me since I've already replaced Windows Search and I'm using a tweaker to be able to define the order of the running programs in the taskbar since Win7 forces grouping by app. With Win7 I got a cryptic search that doesn't work, a start menu that can't be ordered, a taskbar that can't be ordered not even by closing and reopening in a new order like in XP , and a control panel that still after almost a year I have trouble finding things organize in columns but flow left to right and top to down like text??
And of course, actions that used to be visible in a toolbar just a click away are now under menus Windows Explorer. Ribbons are totally dumb too compared with toolbars. Try this: open Paint, select the Rectangle tool and reduce the window width a bit like if you wanted 2 paint windows side-by-side on your screen.
The Rectangle tool gets hidden as the Shapes group shrinks. You don't know anymore which tool is active. Try the same, say in Excel I select the Rectangle tool and I can shrink the window to the max until there are only 4 buttons on the toolbar visible and, guess what, the guy that designed it was smart and the active tool button never gets hidden.
I don't know which usability classes the developers of Win7 have been taking that teach these things. I'm glad I don't do user support anymore so I don't have to teach people how to work with windows and office. All previous windows versions had their annoyances but win7 breaks the record. Windows Search including the start menu and especially the browser history was a great idea. It would be an improvement over XP, if it only worked. Ever since I purchased Window 7 Home Premium, the box on Properties to "Sort Start Menu" has been checked but, the start menu on my system has never sorted anything.
Since Windows will not sort the programs or shortcuts in the menu, is my only option to Manually sort all 2 pages full? I can navigate much, much faster using xp's style of menu order, pause then open folder view operation. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Client. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums.
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