How To Customize Your Start Menu (and other start menu tricks)

The Start menu, which was at first absent from Windows 8, is back in all its glory in Win 10.

It looks like this:start menu editedIf you’re like me you’d like to get rid of many of the boring Microsoft stuff, and put in some shortcuts of your own.

To remove a (boring) shortcut

right-click on a shortcut icon and then click ‘Unpin from Start’.unpin from start

 

To put in your own shortcut

right-click on a program in the desktop (this won’t work with a document, video, etc.) and click on ‘Pin to Start‘.

pin to start

You can also do this simply by dragging the icon from the desktop to the start menu icon.pin to start by dragging

Change the Start menu’s color

Go to start menu>settings,

start menu settings

then choose Personalization,

personalization

 

And then click on Colors, you could pick a color that will adorn all your menus, including the start menu.

colors menu

If you’d choose Orange, for instance, your Start menu will look like this…

orangeness

 

Make the Start menu open in full-screen

Again, if you go to start menu>settings,

start menu settings

then choose Personalization,

personalization

 

and then choose Start on the left in the window that opens up (red in the screenshot below), you could check the option to ‘Use Start full screen‘ (orange in the screenshot below), together with some other less-exciting-but-perhaps-useful options.

use start full screen option

 

To access popular but more advanced options from the Start menu

simply right-click on the Start icon, to see this:

start menu right click

This menu could also be accessed by pressing Windows Key + X on your keyboard.

Disable or enable Cortana

Cortana is one big sticking icon on your Taskbar and start menu that many people don’t even want to use. If you don’t like it that much to, then you may want to disable it and the Cortana icon will turn to the searching magnifier one.

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