I discovered the application SMOz at the Make Use Of Website and decided to give it a try because my start menu is already filling up with all kinds of applications that I have installed on my new computer. Many of these are for testing purposes only but some will remain there permanently.
SMOz is basically a start menu organizer that provides eight folders, like multimedia and games, to organize the start menu properly. It does not do anything that cannot be done with little manual work. It adds eight folders to the Windows Start Menu that could be described as categories. These folders are then automatically populated by SMOz by moving known applications to the corresponding folder.
It would for example move iTunes into the Multimedia folder and Nero Burning Rom into CD-Utilities. To sum it up: It adds eight folders to the Start Menu and scans the existing start menu entries for applications that are in its database to move them to the right folder.
The real question is if you really need a software for that or if it would not be faster to create the folders manually and move the applications afterwards into them. It is still necessary to move most of the installed applications manually into the correct folder because SMOz fails to identify most of them.
SMOz does not provide a way to only move the executable file of a Start Menu entry into another folder. If it is located in a folder the whole folder has to be moved. I never understood the folder concept there anyway for single applications. I do not need access to read me documents, uninstall or the manual in the start menu.
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4 Responses to “Organize the Windows Start Menu”
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I’d suggest ditching the start menu altogether and using an application launcher. I’ve been using Launchy for a year or so, and recently switched to FARR. I almost never use the start menu anymore and it’s way more efficient.
I prefer to organise the start menu myself, even though I use FARR, it still reduces the number of extraneous items (I don’t like help files, read mes, web shortcuts, uninstallers and the like on my start menu either).
Apparently I’m using “the [sic] Microsoft Internet Explorer”, when in fact I’m on FF3. I also believe that it would be better if you change it to recommend other browsers (ala http://browsehappy.com/), rather than commanding your users to use firefox.
I prefer organise start menu manually too.