The Start Menu in Windows Vista comes ready to use for most users, however there are a large number that would prefer to have some customized items within it. Below are a few that I currently use that I find makes life a bit easier for me. I hope you find these tips as useful as I have.
Use Small Icons:
The large icons that windows uses by default are nice for people that like or need the larger items to improve readability, but personally I prefer large screen resolutions with small icons to make the most of what I can put on my screen. There is a simple solution to change the icon size to the smaller versions and enable you to fit more in your menu.
Right click your start menu button and select properties. Click on customize to open the “Customize Start Menu” GUI. The options here are in alphabetical order. You’ll want to scroll down to the Use Large Icons option and uncheck the box.
Hide Recently Used Documents/Programs:
You can disable the Recently Used Documents/Programs tab from the start menu. I’m not exactly sure why you’d want to do this, unless you wanted to add other items to the start menu and just needed the room, but I was able to find this tweak for those of you that may need this.
Right click your start menu button and select properties as before. In the properties GUI about half way down you will see a privacy area. You should notice two boxes that are checked that will store and display the list of recently used programs/documents. Simply uncheck these boxes and that should do it.
Alternatively you can….
Change the Number of Recent Items Displayed:
I personally use a lot of the same documents and programs frequently so I like to have my recent items available to me, the problem is that I actually had about 15 items I wanted listed. The default in Vista is only 10 so I would always have items dropping off the bottom of the list. There is a registry tweak that you can perfom that will allow you to change the number of items displayed.
Caution: The registry is not something to be messed or played with if you don’t know what you are doing. If you don’t feel confident in your skills, DO NOT attempt this or find someone that knows how to do it. If you’d still like to attempt it, please follow the directions at your own risk.
Start by opening the start menu and you can either type regedit in the start search box and select it when it comes up in the results, or if you followed the tutorial Add Run Command to Vista Start Menu you can just enter “regedit.exe” in the run box. You want to navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer by navigating through the appropriate folders. Create a new 32-bit DWORD value and name it MaxRecentDocs. Double click the new value and change it by first changing the Base to Decimal, then you can enter any value in the “Value Data” field. I’d watch out setting it too high, at 15 mine runs fine.
Enable Folders to be “Pinned to Start Menu”:
There is a way that you can Pin items to the start menu to provide easy access to your favorites. I don’t know about you all, but I have some favorite folders also and with the current configuration of Vista it is not possible to pin them to your start menu. Here is another registry tweak that will make this possible.
Lets go ahead and open up your regedit in the same fashion as last time. This time you want to navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\ in the same fashion as last time. Once you get there create a new key called {a2a9545d-a0c2-42b4-9708-a0b2badd77c8} without any value. This should be it.
To test it out, navigate to the parent folder of the folder you wish to pin. While holding the Shift key, right click the folder. You should notice the new menu item named “Pin to Start Menu”. Click this and you’re done.
I hope you found these tips to be useful, keep an eye out later today or tomorrow for Part 2 of this post which will be a video of the previous tutorial. Alternatively, you could subscribe to my RSS Feed to keep up to date on this and further updates.
If you have any other tips you’d like to share or anything else, please leave a comment below.
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