How to Add an Item to the Start Menu

Series Summary

A computer is a complicated system of grouped technologies built upon a simple principle. It performs arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform binary information, moving at the speed of light, into useful media output. A personal computer’s job is to help users create, manipulate, send, receive, or delete information. This seemingly uninteresting definition actually describes how a computer mimics fundamental human functions in some mind boggling and extraordinary ways. As such, the computer is developing into a tool of the imagination, a platform for the approach of the digital life and the promise of a virtual reality. In this free video series on computer software, computer specialist Michael Burton demonstrates how to use and navigate the Microsoft Windows operating system. Burton begins by explaining how to burn a DVD, change a screen saver and how to change the background picture. He then discusses a variety of other topics related to the Windows operating system, such as: how to check the amount of computer memory, create a folder, delete cookies, save a file, capture a screen shot, change the keyboard setting, view network connections and even how to create different user accounts. Watch these free videos and learn to operate and navigate Microsoft Windows today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Michael Burton with Michael Burton Films and we're here talking about how to use Microsoft Windows. The first thing I want to talk about is how to add an item to your start menu. Let me start off by saying that WindowsXP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. Well there's a couple ways you can to do this. Right down here is the start menu on the bottom left hand corner of your screen. You can pin and unpin items from the start menu. Basically you can customize it anyway you wish. As you could see there's already a few programs listed in here. You could see Microsoft Office Word, a Window Media Player, MSN, you got the Media Center and the Internet Explorer. Now, these two items, the Internet Explorer and the Media Center are actually are actually pinned to the start menu. The MSN, the Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office Word are kind of there just because they were the most recent programs used on the computer. Now, for example if we went into All Programs and we brought up for example, the calculator and let's say we needed to use the calculator to do some figurings. Let's say nine times nine, eighty one. O.k., when we close the calculator, the next time when we go down to the start menu and bring it up, the calculator as you can see has been put in to this bin. As a matter of fact I'll show you in a minute, there's a setting where you can actually set how many basic history programs you have in there. Basically where it keeps track of how many programs you've opened the most recent ones. And you can select a certain number. I think I have it set to six right now, currently. But right now I'm going to show you how to actually pin and item, such as the Internet Explorer or the Windows Media Center to the start menu so it's all in there when you need it. O.k. there's a couple ways to going about doing this. The first way to do is just to, once your in the start menu come over here to the right hand side to where it says control panel. You can left click on the control panel and bring this menu up. this is your control panel. The next thing you could do is scroll up to your Appearance and Themes, because it's the way that we want basically the start menu to look. Now as you scroll down here, there's a option a link for Task Bar and Start Menu. O.k., that's pretty self explanatory. Left click on that, bring it open, here you go. This is your Task Bar and Start Menu properties. O.k., as you could see there's already, here's your task bar which is a little bit different than what we want to go in to right now. Right now we want to go in to the start menu and this is the second tab right here. This gives you the options for your start menu. Now we have it selected on the start menu, as you could see here. There's also an option for classic start menu. We're going to talk about both of them. Now if we click on Classic Start Menu, you can see the image up above change, between the start menu and the classic start menu. Now when you click on Classic Start Menu this brings up a button right over here to your right, that says customize. If you click on customize and open it, this gives you the opportunity, as you could see there's a button here called add, to go in and add any program that you want to your start menu. So what you would do is basically click and add it, you would click add, then you would surf, you'd use your browser and search for a program that you want to add to the start menu, just like this. You can click browse and then go in to your My Computer, in your C drive. You can actually go to your program files, and let's say we want to add, I don't know, let's say we want to add you know, iTunes, o.k. So we'd go in and we would chose iTunes to add to our start menu. Then we would come back here and click the next button, since you are done with that. Now it's asking where do you want the shortcut to be placed. Well you want it under the start menu, you can put it in your programs folder if you wish. Or you can actually put it on your start menu by just highlighting Start Menu and then clicking next. This is the name that we've chosen already, It's already pre named in there for our shortcut. We're going to call it iTunes. So we're going to click finish. So now, if we come down here to the left, and we open up our start menu, there should be an iTune icon in here but, I know what happened, we didn't finish. So we come back here, click OK and then Apply and then OK. So now that when we come down to the start menu, as you scroll up there should be a link, it's a folder for your iTunes. You can actually link in to your iTunes folder. Now if you want it to link to an actual program, we would have had to choose the actual program icon, which I should have chose which is right here. This is the iTunes program icon which we should have chosen if we really wanted to open iTunes. So this links us to the actual iTunes folder. So, in a way that works the exact same way. But you could have actually put the iTunes programs on there so that whenever you went down to the start menu, you could have scrolled up and clicked on iTunes, it would have brought up the program, iTunes. Now, for example, if we go back in to our Appearance and Themes, Task Barr and Start Menu, we go back to our start menu. The difference between Classic Start Menu and regular Start Menu is Classic Start Menu, you can only add things that way or by dragging and dropping, which I'm going to show you right now. But in the regular Start Menu, I think this is easier. You select Start Menu, now when you go to the customize button here for Start Menu, it doesn't give you any options as to what to put in here. Now it does show you here on the screen that the number of programs on the start menu is six That's what I have it programed, but you can change that to any number that you wish. I choose six, you can put in as many in as you want. The best way, if you're on this, the generic or the new Start Menu look, there's a couple ways. We close this down. I think one of the best ways to do it, is to just drag and drop. For example, let's say we want create a link to this My Videos folder, right here. The best way to do this, and we want to create the link on the start menu. The best way to do it is to take it, and to drag and to bring it down here to the start menu, and drop it in there. Do you see how it creates a folder right here called My Videos? That means that it is now pinned to the start menu. Now if you right click on this folder, you can actually remove it from the list. But as of right now, that's pinned to your start menu. Just like Media Center, if you were to right click on Media Center, you could actually click, unpin from start menu and it'll actually take it off of here. Now another option to this, notice how it didn't move the My Videos folder, it just created a shortcut under the start menu to your actual My Videos folder. Now another example would be if we were to right click on a program that we wanted in to the pin menu, or to the start menu, it would actually give us an option to pin that program to the menu. Let me show you. If we went to My Computer and we opened up our C drive and we went to our program file, and we chose a program. Let's say we wanted to do the iTunes again. Where is it, right there. we double click on iTunes, open up iTunes. Here's that application icon. If we right click on this icon, you see right here how it says pin to start menu? If we left click on that, and now we scroll over here to our start menu and bring it up, you can see that it created a link to our iTunes, right there. And that if we were to click on it, would open our iTunes and that would work for us. So you can see that there's many different ways to pin and for example if I were to right click on this iTune you could actually unpin it from the start menu. So there's even the drop and drag method, there's the right click and select pin from start menu and there's also on the Classic Start Menu there's the way to actually go in and browse and add the programs that you want to add. So there's many different ways to do this."