"A meek endeavor to the triumph" by Sampath Jayarathna

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Windows Vista – How to Organize Start Menu All Programs

My first PC with windows 98 was with very much messy All Programs menu. I remember who told me and showed me to make it organize and clean. Thanks to Charith Gunasekara(Pola), I learnt one such a good habit. Make it clean your Start Menu All Programs list. I did this easily with all previous Windows Operating systems, except Vista which took some learning cycle due to not looking at the exact place. Windows 98, 2000, XP resembles same way of locating the start menu programs by going in to Documents & Settings and selecting the particular user and then start creating folder list to make it organize whatever the way you pleased (Not sure that the correct location in Windows 98, b’se its way back sometime).
Vista is bit different to do the same task. I tried to locate it in the same way in C:\ drive, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I did some Googleing to find it but no success. Lots of people suggest locating it in C:\Users…… or some other locations, but I couldn’t find those places. Oh one thing mine is Windows Vista Home Premium (64bit OS) with Service Pack 1. After some learning curve, I found we can easily do this without going to details in C:\
OK. Here’s how to do this,

1. Click on Start Menu and then right click on the All programs
2. Now from the popup menu, click on “Open All Users”
3. This will Open the window for your start menu all programs
4. Now create whatever the folders you wish to be at your all programs list. I usually create folders for Office, Entertainment, Programming, Graphics, Utilities, Internet etc…This is as you wish
5. Now close the window and go back to the start menu all programs and now drag and drop appropriate programs into each folder in the list. This is little bit different in Vista, where you need to wait a second on top of the folder name to open the list, then only you can drop your item inside the folder itself.

Again thanks Charith for enlighten me on this organizing thing; it makes the Start menu experience so much easier.

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