Disabling personalized menus

Personalized menus is a feature in Windows that has been around for a little while. It uses your program run history to hide all of the other programs in your Start Menu program listing that you don't use or don't use often. After a user has used his computer for a short while, Windows will hide all of the programs that the user does not run so that he can find his most frequently run programs more easily.

Personalized menus sound like a great feature, but really think about it. Why would you have programs in your Start Menu that you don't use? If there is a program that is installed and never used on my computer, I uninstall it. You don't need to be wasting your storage space with useless programs.

Additionally, I have had experience with some beginning computer users complaining that Windows deleted all of their programs because they are no longer showing up in the Start Menu programs listing. Well as you probably know, they are still listed; the user just didn't realize that if they click the down arrow, it will expand the Start Menu back to its original size so they can view all the programs.

When considering all of these issues with personalized menus, I can't see why you would want to have this feature enabled. Follow these steps to take back your computer:

1. Right-click the Start Menu and select Properties.

2. Click the bottom Customize button to bring up the Customize Classic Start Menu window.

3. Locate the Advanced Start Menu options box, and scroll down all the way to the
bottom.

4. You should now be able to see the Use Personalized Menus setting. Just uncheck the box to disable the feature.

5. Click OK to save your changes.

6. Click OK once more to close the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window.

Now you will no longer have to deal with your programs disappearing. I highly recommend that you disable this feature on any beginner computer user's computer as well, to save yourself a headache explaining to them that Windows didn't really delete everything.