How to customize the Windows XP Start Menu

Posted on April 2, 2007 at 3:52 pm

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to change your Windows XP Start Menu to suit your needs. Basically, the Start Menu has four sections: The pinned items at the top left, the recently used programs at the bottom left, the “My…” folders at the top “right and the Windows settings at the bottom right. Here’s what my menu looks like:

Now you might have noticed a couple of things that might be different from your Start Menu. First off, there is a lot of crap on my Start menu and that’s because I have a couple of programs that I run very often and like to make sure are on the Start menu at all time (the top left “pinned” items). Secondly, I increased the number of recently used programs to show 10 instead of the default.

At the top right, I have all of the My XXXX folders listed that I used most often. Also on the right, I got rid of the Dell link that was nothing more than a introduction to the computer and replaced it with Administrative Tools and the Control Panel. You may have also noticed that some of the items, such as Control Panel are actually menus and not links, so I can expand the menu and choose the items specifically:

First, we’ll go over how you can add items to the “Pinned” menu, which basically stays on your Start Menu all the time so you can use this space for the program you use most often. Now you might ask why not use the Quick Launch toolbar instead to get to your most used programs? Well, I have so many “most used” programs that I keep smaller programs like Notepad, Calculator, Remote Desktop, etc on the Start Menu because I don’t want to clutter up my Quick Launch bar too much.

In order to PIN an item to your Start Menu, you can do two things: Firstly, you can right click on a program in your recently used list and choose “Pin to Start Menu”.

The second way to PIN an item is to simply drap it to the top section. You’ll see a line that separates the pinned items from the recently used programs below it. Simply drag a program icon from either the recent programs or by going to All Programs and dragging the item from there. For example, here I am dragging the Firefox icon from the All Programs list and dropping it onto the Pin section. You’ll see that when you hover over the area, the line becomes a dark black line.

And that’s it! Next to customize the rest of the Start Menu, you have to click on Start and then right click on an empty spot and choose Properties. Usually somewhere right above the Shut Down or Log Off buttons.

Click the “Customize” button to get to the options for the Start menu:

On the General tab, you’ll see the options to use either Large Icons or Small Icons. My menu is small icons, but if you can’t stand it being that small, then choose large icons. The “Number of programs on Start Menu” option is what I was talking about earlier and this gives you the ability to show a larger or smaller number of recent programs. Finally, you can choose your default browser and default email program that shows up at the top of the Start Menu pinned section. If you have Firefox or some othe mail client installed, it will show up here.

Clicking on the Advanced tab, here you can set the more advanced options. If you’re like me and you hate it when you install a program and Windows highlights the newly installed program, then you can simply uncheck that box from the top. The list box, allows you to add or remove items such as the Control Panel, Network Connections, Adminstrative Tools, Help and Support, etc. You can choose whether you want them to display as links or as menus (where they open out). You can also choose to show recent documents or remove the item altogether.