How to Customize the Windows Vista Start Menu

Video Transcript

"Did you know that the start menu in the Windows XP in Vista is actually just Windows Explorer. Hi, I'm Dan Alfonso with Alfonso Consulting and Info IT and this is how to customize your Vista's start menu. And the most important thing to understand about Vista is that customizing a start menu isn't really any different than doing it in an XP. They just made it prettier and they'd moved some stuff around. I find it okay, a lot of people find it very annoying. So let's just start with the basics. No.1, just go over here to anywhere and we can get properties. When we go to start menu and we've got the start menu obviously. But we can go to the classic start menu and yes that's right. A blast from the past, Windows 2000 all over again. And this is fine and all that, but, you know, it, it doesn't really bring out the best Vista has to offer. I don't like having to have these icons on my desktop. I don't like, you know, anyway, so I'm going to switch this back. Alright. So, we can deal with this. Well, here there's a customize button and from here we can do is we can change the basic appearance of some of th things that are in here. The computer link, for instance, right here. Right now if I click on it, I get explorer. That's fine. So I'm going to change to display, as a menu item and apply it. And now what I get here, when I got to computer is, I can just go over here and click on anything in my computer and then get the message. So now I can get to see C drive, kind of handy. And you can do this for a lot of things on the start menu. I'm not going to go through every last one of them. A couple of the interesting things, a default programs, very handy, this is your mail and your email application. Your favorites, you can have your favorites on there; you can have your games. Highlighting new installed programs, I actually find out to be kind of helpful for new users when they can't find things of if your the kind of person who has about a thousand things in your start menu. Now, useful things are the run command. I use it all the time. Maybe you don't want everyone to have such easy access to this because it can lead to trouble, I enable it, I would recommend you disable this on a lot of systems. Search, search program, go ahead and play around with it. One of the options you have here is to store and display a list of recently open files. If you want people seeing files that you've opened recently or you want to be able to find files that you've opened recently because you're constantly going after all these files, or you're just working on a set of files, you have to flip between them a lot; it's a good option to have. Otherwise, turn it off; it's just kind of, it's clutter. So I'm going to turn it off, hit okay and see, the recent items is now gone for over here. Some other options; store and display list of recently open programs. And what you're seeing is this over here. I actually kind of like this. It lets me get to stuff that I've been using recently and pretty often. So, I'm going to leave it on. But if you were to get rid of it, you'll see all you got is your, your default application. You can still go to all programs and get it. That's how to customize the Vista start menu. I'm Dan Alfonso. Enjoy!"