Clean things up with Tidy Start Menu: How to Create a Personalized and Functional Start Menu for You

The new Start menu in Windows 11 is off to a shaky start. Though it probably has its fans, many people have given its interface a thumbs down. If you're one of them, though, you can do more than just complain about it.

If you want to change anything, head to Settings > Personalization > Start, where you can tell Windows to stop showing recently installed apps, frequently used apps, and recently opened items in the Start menu, App List, and elsewhere. Experiment with each of these three options to determine which ones to turn on and off. If you turn all three options off, the Recommended section of the Start menu will be empty.

Clean things up with Tidy Start Menu

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The first option is to use Talk to Cortana on the Taskbar. The improved search in Windows 10 means you can open the Start Menu (with the Windows key), start typing for an app or file and immediately open it with the Enter key.

Every storage device in your computer has access to the Disk Cleanup tool. Find it by clicking the Start button, typing "disk cleanup" (whenever I say to type something, I mean without the quotes), and clicking the Disk Cleanup shortcut in your search results. Click and drag this shortcut to your desktop or taskbar for easier access next time. You can also find the tool by right-clicking a storage device in File Explorer, selecting Properties, and clicking the Disk Cleanup button to the right of the pie chart.

If you have a lot of stuff to clean up, it may take the tool several minutes to analyze your situation and get your cruft organized for deletion. Once that's done, you'll be presented with a new window containing a list of things that are safe to delete. Some boxes are even prechecked, such as the one next to Temporary Internet Files.

Chrome and Firefox caches get cleaned from within those apps through a menu accessed by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete when the browser is open. It's preferable to do it within the browser, because you get more detailed control over what you want to keep and get rid of.

The Disk Cleanup tool has one list item specifically for thumbnails. Thumbnails include things like app icons and picture previews. But if you clear out this cache, Windows will have to regenerate those images the next time you view a folder with a lot of media or icons in it. Each thumbnail will also take time to recreate, so a large folder may take several minutes to rebuild its cache. If you're looking for a specific picture or video, you may have to wait until the thumbnail has been created, unless you know its file name.

The right click (context) menu is minimal and clean on a fresh installation of Windows. Install a bunch of applications and soon the context menu is loaded with all kinds of opening options from various applications.

Items that appear only on certain file types (Ex: Right clicking a MP3 file shows up a context menu with items from Windows Media Player/Foobar2000/VLC/your-favorite-media-player begging to open this file.)

If you are ready to install Windows 10, stop for a minute to find out how you customize the Windows 10 start menu. You will save yourself time and avoid a major hassle for your end users. We love Windows 10, but not the start menu, which still contains many icons that most users do not use.

First, you need to customize the Windows 10 start menu the way you want it to look, by removing all unnecessary applications from the start menu. In my example I removed everything except the File Explorer to keep the start menu clean.

Following our previous posts on Windows 10 Customization and how to modify the taskbar configuration, we will detail how to configure the start menu and taskbar with the latest indication from Microsoft.

I have this working, with no issues.The only problem that i have is pinning software center to the start menu. And the worst part that its not consistent. Sometimes its there and sometimes i have a blank tile.

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Export-StartLayout -Path c:\temp\startmenu.xmlExport-StartLayout : Element not found.Thrown exception in StartTileData.dllAt line:1 char:1+ Export-StartLayout -Path c:\temp\startmenu.xml+ + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Export-StartLayout], COMException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException,Microsoft.Windows.StartLayout.Commands.Expor tStartLayoutCommand

The right side of the Start menu is all that remains of the Great Touchscreen Experiment of 2012, during which Microsoft expected every PC on earth to come with a touchscreen. Instead of a Start menu, you got a Start screen, stretching from edge to edge of your monitor, displaying your files, folders, and programs as big rectangular tiles.

Perhaps it is worth discussing whether to make some such changes to the Fiji distribution itself, to clean things up for everyone, rather than only for your group. What do you think? Do you have a list of proposed changes to discuss?

Yes, I think lack of time is the reason why still nobody has tackled this. And the Command Finder makes it too easy to find things, so the pressure is not high enough to do some spring cleaning in the menus.

Arguably, these may not even be good guidelines and following these would still cause problems (what to do when a submenu becomes extremely long? or what to do to avoid the propagation of spurious submenus?) But perhaps this could be used as a starting point?

Use Start Page on All Devices: Select this to use the same start page settings on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and other Mac computers. You must be signed in to your other Apple devices with the same Apple ID as on your Mac and have Safari turned on in iCloud settings. You must also turn on two-factor authentication on all your Apple devices. See the Apple Support article Two-factor authentication for Apple ID.

To ensure your Windows 10 or 11 PC continues to run smoothly, you should clean up your PC on a regular basis. Cleaning a PC basically involves getting rid of unwanted files, adjusting the startup programs list, and defragging the drives.

On Windows 8, click the Windows icon in the lower-left to open the Start menu, then type disk cleanup. Select Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files from the search results.

Along with being slow, HDDs also suffer from fragmentation. The more programs and files you use, the more cluttered your disk becomes. Defrag your disk by opening up your Start menu, typing in defrag, and hitting the Enter key.

For faster startups on your PC or laptop, customize which programs open on startup and other settings, and upgrade from HDD to SSD storage. For even faster boot times and slicker all-around performance, use a PC optimizer equipped with cleanup tools and a driver updater to shut down unnecessary background processes. And always keep graphics drivers updated.

Along with hiding apps, Apple has given users the ability to hide apps and even entire home screens so you can quickly clean things up. To hide an entire home screen, press on an empty part of the home screen until the apps start to wiggle. Then tap the pages icon above the dock. Images of all of your home screens will appear and you can tap the circle below any of them to show or hide them. If you want to remove an icon, long-press until the menu appears and then tap Remove App. On the next screen tap Remove from Home Screen.

If your desktop is littered with icons, you should probably tidy things up a bit. Right-click (two-finger tap on a trackpad) any open space and choose Clean Up to get things arranged neatly, or Clean Up By to sort them as well. Consider the Use Stacks feature to automatically stack-up files of the same type into a single icon. Just click on that icon to open the stack. This can really tidy up your desktop!

I feel customization of the start menu is straightforward as per my testing. But, the taskbar customization is a bit tricky in my experience. You can read more about this at the end of this post about my test results. Windows 11 Start Menu Layout customization options using JSON file are updated in the below post.

Here is a quick step-by-step guide to help you to deploy the prepared XML file. This Intune policy helps to customize the start menu and taskbar for Windows 10 devices.

The applicability rules are important because Windows 11 start menu and taskbar layouts are entirely different, so you want to be very specific about Windows 10 taskbar layout should be applicable only to Windows 10 devices and not to Windows 11 devices.

If you enjoy the convenience of being able to quickly access your recent items (Word files, Excel files, etc) without needing to open the application first or find the files in your folders, you can have a link to all of them right in your start menu.

Luckily, Windows 11 is rather intuitive and it only takes a couple of clicks and tweaks to work the new Start menu into something you feel comfortable with using. And doing this will make sure you have all the apps you want rather close to your fingertips, or mouse cursor.

Kondo says that she has been interested in organizing since childhood.[4] In junior school, Kondo ran into the classroom to tidy up bookshelves while her classmates were playing in physical education class.[9] Whenever there were nominations for class roles, she did not seek to be the class representative or the pet feeder. Instead, she yearned to be the bookshelf manager to continue to tidy up books. She said she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day: "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."[10] 2ff7e9595c