Previously I had used a whole combination of toolbars and application launchers so it was a welcome change to remove some of this clutter.

One of the notable alternatives to pop up was the Vista Start Menu, a replacement for both the XP and Vista menus. Developer Dennis Nazarenko created it becuase he says:

“I have always found the Start Menu in Windows to be inconvenient to use. In the new Windows Vista it’s been made more attractive but more inconvenient than even before!”

His replacement is definitely a more useful option for XP but I would never recommend using it in Vista, it would be somewhat of a step backwards.

In fact you can actually get the Vista Start Menu in XP, thanks to the Vista Start Menu Emulator by Folgelsoft. It is a completely accurate version of the Vista start menu for XP, and I think it’s very impressive. In fact I on my XP computer I love using this application as it functions almost identically to the real thing and is a dead ringer looks-wise.

The performance is also impressive, no lag or slow down compared to the default menu and it loads very fast on the initial login. The integrated search is almost instant, and better in some ways then Vista, but that’s becuase the VSME only searches the shortcuts within the menu itself. Vista indexes the entire system.

So if you want to give the new start menu a try without upgrading then this is how you can do it. Admittedly it looks a bit funny when used with the Luna theme as it’s black and transparent, but you can always skin your desktop to match.

Update: The Vista Start Menu Emulator homepage is no longer available. We have uploaded the last public version of the software program to our servers. You can download it here: Vista Start Menu Emulator (41)

The default commands open Word, let you search Google, Yahoo, Live Search and IMDB, use Sudo application to start the application with admin rights and search Wikipedia and Dictionary.com. Using the command “y spyware spam fighting” would open search results from the Yahoo search for that query in your default browser. Everything described until now have been so called Command Startlets. Start++ has another feature which is called Search Startlets. The commands play, playartist and playalbum followed by the name of an artist search your hard drives for that name and play the songs, videos or albums automatically. Play Who by Fire for instance would search for the Song Who by Fire from Leonard Cohen and play it if found on the system.

The biggest advantage of Start++ is of course that every user may add commands to Start++ that aid him in working with Windows Vista. You can add new commands and search startlets. New commands could open applications with a simple shortcut. Let me give an example of how that would work.

I will add a command to launch notepad from the search box. I click on New in the list of commands and type !note as the shortcut. Name can be anything that you like so Notepad would be good to be able to identify what the command is doing. The command itself is simply notepad.exe

Once Saved I can start Notepad by typing in !note in the search box of the start menu. You sometimes have to add the full path to an application but that is the only thing that might differ.

Adding Internet searches is a little bit more trickier. Lets add a command that searches eBay for the search string that we enter. We have to perform a search on eBay to see how eBay handles the parameters. Go to eBay.com and enter a search term, test for instance. Take a look at the url and search for test in there. We have to replace test with %+ in the command box from start++.

So, to add a eBay search we would create a new command, give it the shortcut e and the name eBay and add the following line to the command http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=%+&category0= Please note that I removed some of the options in the url to shorten the output on my blog. You can now search eBay for antivirus software using the command “e antivirus”. The same principle applies to many other sites such as Amazon, Digg and others.

I compiled a list for some popular web services on the next page, just copy the urls into the command box.

• Amazon
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Ebay
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Lifehacker
• Myspace
• Techcrunch
• Youtube

As you can see it is pretty easy to add your favorite site to start++.

Search Startlets use a slightly more complicated syntax. If you take a look at the play shortcut you notice the command kind:(music OR video) %* store:file ; Let me explain the variables here:

• kind: refers to the type of file that you want to play, in this case we have choose to include a OR statement which means that a search for music and video files is performed.
• %* means that all results are added to the playlist, %1 would mean that only the first and %n where n is a number would add that number to the playlist and play them.
• store:file – Well I can only guess here but i suppose that it defines that it should search for files only.

Start++ is a very nice application that added tremendous usability to Windows Vista. Can only recommend it to everyone who is running Vista.