Joshua’s recommendation was to try out the Vista Start Menu application in previous Microsoft operating systems like Windows XP. The differences in Windows Vista were not important enough to justify the replacement in Windows Vista though.

So what are the main benefits of Vista Start Menu? Vista Start Menu adds several functions on top and below the start menu that are not available in the default versions. The top bar contains all the logout, user switching and shutdown options which are accessible by hotkeys and the mouse. The bottom bar contains options to perform a local search, to open the run box and to perform a Google Search. Each with its own hotkey for faster access to speed up Vista and other operating systems it is installed on.

The Vista start menu itself got a revamp and some features were included that make lots of sense. The start menu is completely resizable and it can even be placed on any part of the monitor screen. The entries of the start menu stay in place even if an application gets uninstalled from the system which works great in combination with the hotkeys to open applications or menus with just the keyboard.

Vista Start Menu is compatible to all Windows NT operating systems including 64-bit versions.

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ViStart is one of the possibilities to change the Windows XP startmenu into the one from Windows Vista. Unfortunately though the author did not add any kind of instructions or readme to his site or to the files that are downloaded. Making matters worse is the fact that there are two executables in the archive and it is absolutely impossible to tell which one to execute.

I decided to start the first one ViStart2490.exe and it worked so I did not test the second one named ViStart.exe as well. From what i can tell this could be working as well, they are probably different builds only.

After executing the file it took a few seconds until I was able to access the new Vista startmenu in Windows XP. It sure looks shiny and has all the transparency effects included. I was not really able to find out if there are some kind of options that you can access for configuring the startmenu the way you can do it in Vista.

It is possible to easily get rid of the startmenu again by simply opening the task manager and killing the vistart process.

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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.

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