Habitually Good

If you are anything like me, you must have literally hundreds of software installed on your computer. Even though I have a large number of applications installed on my laptop, 80% of the time, I am only using 20% of them.

One side effect of having so many installed is that your Start Menu becomes humongous, and consequently, it becomes slow. Whenever you click on your Start button and then point to Programs, there is noticeable pause before the menu actually opens up. So, what do you do when your Windows Start Menu is very slow to open?

Here’s a quick tip to speed that up considerably:  Organize.

Below is a screen shot of what my Start Menu looks like:

As you can see, the first level of my “All Programs” only has 6 items. It took me about 10 minutes to organize the 100’s of items that I had in my Start Menu to this. I broke them up into whatever categories suited me best. You can make your own. Even in the sub-menus, I created further categories to organize it further.

After doing all this, my menus open in less than a split second. A few more tips:

• You can put your most frequently accessed programs either on the quick launch bar or stick them to the Start Menu by right clicking the shortcut and choosing “Pin to Start Menu”.
• Over time, I tend to install and uninstall programs. The problem with a lot of programs is that when you uninstall them, they still leave dead links and menus in the Start Menu. Find them and delete them manually.

A very quick Start Menu saves a lot of time during the day; actually more than time, it saves a lot of frustration.

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