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I enabled “Display as a menu.” The various drives and top folders appear on a fly-out menu. If you’re running on a relatively low-resolution monitor (like a laptop), you may want to keep the number at 10. The default is 10 I set it to 20, since I have a large display.
Number of recent programs / recent items to display (under “Start menu size”). My personal preference is alphabetical sort, which you could do in XP by context clicking on the All Programs section and sorting. This tends to give recent XP converts heartburn, but you can change this behavior when you customize the Start menu. Unlike XP, though, the applications are sorted alphabetically. Lots of people happily use the Start menu in this state, which is very XP-like. When you start up a new system, or perform a clean install of Windows, this is the Start menu you see. The Start menu, at its most basic.The Start menu is so named because that’s where you go to start applications, restart or shut down Windows, and perform other basic application management chores. I’ll first walk through the plethora of options for each, and then dive into how to use them more effectively. However, they also offer a slew of additional capabilities and customization options that aren’t obvious when you first look at them. In Windows 7, the Start menu and the taskbar have become both easier to use and more sophisticated.