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CUSTOMIZING THE START MENU
When you have programs that install themselves on your
system through a program typically called
"INSTALL.EXE" or "SETUP.EXE", they
will normally add one or more line items to the Start
menu. This is also true when you add a program through
the "Add/Remove Programs" icon in the Control
Panel (which you can access through "Settings"
on the Start menu.) But what if you already had a bunch
of programs on your computer from Windows 3.x when you
upgraded to Windows 95, and these were not included in
your Start menu; can you add them? Yep, and there are
several different techniques for doing it...
First of all, you can right-click on the Task Bar, then
choose "Properties" from the context menu that
pops up. Next click on the tab for Start Menu Programs.
When you select the button for Add, a "wizard"
will lead you through the process of adding a shortcut
for any desired program to the Start menu. A second way
to add something to the Start menu is to simply drag a
shortcut onto the Start button. This method is rather
limited because it just puts that new item at the top of
the first cascading menu. What if there were a specific
place you wanted to add your new program on the menu?
Say, for example, you already had a folder for Word
Processing programs, which currently has MicroSoft Word
in it, but you would like to add an entry for Pc Outline?
Method number one above will work. But here's another:
If you start up Explorer and expand the subdirectory list
under your Windows directory (by clicking on the
"+" sign next to the icon), you will see that
one of the subdirectories is called Start Menu. Now
expand the subdirectory list for Start Menu, and you will
see a directory called Programs. Finally, expanding that
list, you will see a folder for each of the items that
cascade up (or down) on the Start menu, including your
"Word Processing" folder. Now let's say that
the main executable program for Pc Outline is called
PCO.EXE, and it's currently in a directory called PCO. So
click on the PCO folder to get a list of its contents in
the right panel of the Explorer screen. Find the icon for
PCO.EXE and drag it to Word Processing folder while
holding down the right mouse button. When you release the
mouse button, choose "Create Shortcut{s) Here"
from the context menu that pops up. You could also choose
to right-drag the entire PCO folder to the Word
Processing folder, instead of only the main executable
program. This will add a new cascading submenu for PCO to
the submenu Word Processing. So you can see that another
powerful way to modify the Start Menu is to directly
manipulate folders and files in Explorer, creating new
folders, deleting old ones, moving or copying or creating
shortcuts...
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