Welcome to beyourownit.com free video support series. Today we’re going to look at how to organize your Start menu. As you install programs, it can get pretty large. What is the Start menu? Well here it is. This is how it looks in XP, yours may look a little different.

And then of course, most people’s first move is to the All programs. You can see I have two blocks here. I’ve actually seen computers with four blocks. I’m not even kidding you. I’ve seen it just totally expand across the entire screen. I like to keep mine kind of neat but I left this user kind of raw so I could do things like this for you guys.

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Now, getting to the point. You can see there are a lot of things in here and it can get annoying. I mean we all organize our desks at work or at home and we find that it makes us more productive. So why should your computer “desk” be so messy? You really have the same effect. It really will make you more productive throughout your day as you use your computer.

Me, I just like it because it’s not so cluttered. To remove something from here, let’s say, here’s a perfect example. I have a shortcut for Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0. And then, if you look up here I have Acrobat Reader 7.0. If you ask, I don’t need either one of them. Whenever I open a PDF, Adobe opens already. I don’t need to have a shortcut to it.

So you can remove it from here real easy by right-clicking on it and going to delete. Windows will even tell you what I’m about to tell you. It doesn’t delete the program; it just removes it from the list.

So if you’re looking to uninstall a program, remember to use control panel, add/remove programs to do that. But, if you want to keep the program but you just don’t want it cluttering up your start menu, get rid of it. Now when we go back, it’s gone. The list got a tiny bit better.

Now let’s say I remove Adobe Reader 7.0 and Photoshop. You know you can kind of go all through this to really organize it all out. You could even do the same for folders. I don’t need Microsoft tools in here. I never use it. This is the All users folder. That’s perfectly fine. Gone, get rid of it. DivX, don’t need it. Get rid of it.

Now, what it’s going to say is some of these things are only related to me, my user, beyourownit. Other people that use this computer may have things that are only related to them but then there are things that are for all users and that’s what that warning was telling me. “Hey, all users are going to lose this because it’s an all users folder.”

But, remember, you’re not deleting the program. Microsoft Office still works, Adobe Acrobat still works, all that. Another thing you can do here is remember, when you have things in here maybe I don’t like the command prompt. This is generated basically based on what you use more popular. But maybe you have…Outlook Express here. I don’t use Outlook Express. I use Outlook. You can right-click on it and remove it, and now it’s gone.

So my point is that you can really customize your Start menu without too much worry and keep everything a lot cleaner and easier to get to. Say I only use, basically, maybe Firefox and a few games in here and so on. Camtasia, which I’m using right now, or Camtasia. I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it, but that’s how you edit your Start menu. You can just right-click on something, remove it from the list.

Now this is going to generate automatically what I use most so it won’t just disappear. But, you can, from the upper one, get rid of these. Another option is to right-click on the Start button itself and open all users. You can see here, all users have these shortcuts. If you go into the programs, all users have these programs. If I want to remove OpenOffice from the Start menu, I can do it from here and now when I go back to the Start menu it’s gone.

That’s a quick, easy way to keep your Start menu clean and keep the programs you like where you want them. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you visit our website and remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can keep up-to-date when we upload new videos. Thanks and have a great day.