Adding and removing navigation icons

Adding and removing navigation icons
Many icons on the new Start panel will help you navigate through Windows in a way you
have never done before. All of the icons that are displayed can be customized to fit your
needs so that you can have one-click access to several different parts of your computer. Icons
such as My Computer, My Music, Network Connections, and many more are now placed
right on the Start panel. Windows XP gives you the capability to add even more.
Additionally, these icons can be transformed into pop-up menus that expand and show the
details. For example, instead of just displaying the My Computer icon, when you move your
mouse over the icon, it can pop up a menu that will display shortcuts to each of the separate
drives on your computer.

These new features allow you to be much more efficient when working with your computer.
You can save yourself a lot of time by enabling the auto-expanding pop-up menu feature on
many of the utility icons such as Control Panel. This way, you can have access to all of your
Control Panel applets with just one click on the Start Menu.
Windows XP makes it possible to edit most of the navigation icons right from within the user
interface so you don’t have to worry about hacking the registry in this section. To get started,
follow these steps:

. Right-click the Start button and select Properties, as shown in Figure 2-4.
2. You should now see the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window. Next, click the top
Customize button, and the Start Menu settings will load.
3. The Customize Start Menu is where you can change many aspects of the Start panel; for
now, click the Advanced tab. You will learn about some of the items on the General tab
in the next few sections.
4. Once you have the Advanced tab displayed, you will see the Start Menu items scroll box.
In this box you will see a list of all of the different features for the icons that can be dis-
played on the Start panel. Table 2-2 lists in detail all of the different features and their
separate options. For demonstration purposes, let’s make the My Computer icon expand
automatically to show all of the drives. Scroll down in the box until you see the My
Computer title.
5. Then select the Display as a Menu option, as shown in Figure 2-5, to enable the Auto
Expand feature.
6. Click OK twice, and your change is now complete.

As you can see, making changes to the items on the Start panel is quite simple. Take a look at
Table 2-2 for more information on all of the navigation icons that you can customize with the
method just described.