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Unless you specifically tell a program otherwise, most programs nowadays will add themselves to your start menu when you install them. If you navigate your start menu often you know how annoying it is to view the dozens (hundreds?) of entries there. If while reading those first two sentences you thought to yourself “yep… that is me” then Tidy Start Menu is the program for:
TSM (Tidy Start Menu) has a simple goal in mind: to help you organize your start menu. It accomplishes this goal by allowing you to place each start menu entry under a specific category folder in your start menu instead of all them appearing at once when you open your start menu:
The above screenshot is of a Vista start menu. XP start menu will be similar but… XPish.
All of my start menu entries are organized as sub-entries under specific category folders such as “Games” or “Graphics” or “Internet”. It works like a charm; doesn’t my start menu look… organized? :D
To accomplish what I have done (as shown above) use the “Simple Mode” feature of TSM:
The screenshot above is of “Simple Mode”. “Explorer Mode” is very limited in the freeware version of Tidy Start Menu. Too limited if you ask me.
All your start menu folders/entries are shown to you. All you need to do is go through all of the categories (“Office”, “Utilities”, “Games”, etc.) and check the boxes next to the start menu entries you would like to reorganize under each respective category. As you check the box next to each start menu entry, that entry is moved into the folder of the category in the start menu. To move it back out of the category just uncheck the box. Note that there is no “saving your settings” or “applying changes”: any change made with Tidy Start Menu is done in real time to your start menu.
If after using Tidy Start Menu your start menu still has other folders in it (this happened to me), just restart your computer – they should go away.
Now as I mentioned above, everything you do in Tidy Start Menu is done in real time. So before you start organizing your start menu I suggest you take advantage of the start menu backup abilities of TSM:
Just backup your start menu before doing anything so you can restore it if anything goes wrong.
Ready to download Tidy Start Menu? Grab it from the following link:
***Tidy Start Menu works on Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP and Vista.
Thanks Liam!
