Specifications

primarily for cruising the Internet or sending email, or
if you use it on an infrequent basis, a weekly or even
monthly backup may be sufcient. If you maintain
original company data les (client reports, letters, and
so on) at home, or you run a small business from your
computer, backups are especially important. The UK’s
Department of Trade and Industry did a study recently
in which it found that 70% of companies experiencing
a major data loss go out of business within a year. If
you do such things as print out important email mes-
sages or make hard copies of reports often, your paper
backups will give you some protection against the loss
of important data.
Expand The Start Menu
Begin by putting some of the things you need to get
to most often (such as recently opened documents,
Control Panel applets, and the contents of the My
Computer folder), onto the Start menu as expandable
submenus so that you can get to them without wait-
ing for windows to open. Right-click the Start button,
choose Properties, and click Customize on the Start
Menu tab. Start by deselecting Open Submenus When
I Pause On Them With My Mouse on the Advanced
tab, which will keep you from accidentally starting
programs as you search for others. In the Start Menu
Items box:
• Under Control Panel, select Display As A
Menu. This will put an expandable Control Panel
menu on your Start menu, from which you can choose
any of the Control Panel applets. In other words, you
don't have to wait for the Control Panel to display to
open, say, the Add/Remove Programs Wizard.
• Under My Computer, select Display As A
Menu. This puts an expandable My Computer menu
on your Start menu, from which you can quickly ac-
cess the contents of any of your hard drives.
• Under Network Connections, select Don't Dis-
play This Item. You don't need it unless you constantly
add or troubleshoot network connections.
• Select the Scroll Programs option. With this
option selected, a program list too tall for the screen
will become scrollable rather than spreading out to the
side and covering more of your screen.
• Finally, make sure List My Most Recently
Opened Documents is checked; this will add a My
Recent Documents item to the Start menu, which will
expand to display your 15 most recently opened docu-
ments. Click OK.
Get There Faster With Quick Launch
You can get to your favorite programs even faster—
directly from the Taskbar, instead of having to click
the Start button—if you add them to the Quick Launch
toolbar, an optional Taskbar toolbar. Add the Quick
Launch toolbar to the Taskbar.Right-click any blank
area of the Taskbar and choose Toolbars and then
Quick Launch.
The Quick Launch toolbar should appear just to the
right of your Start button. At a minimum, it will
display perhaps the most useful Taskbar button of all:
the Desktop button, which you can click to instantly
minimize all open program windows and display your
entire Desktop. It may also include buttons certain
programs automatically added when you installed
them. Make room for pinning more programs to the
Start menu by reducing the number of programs Win-
dows automatically lists there.
Add buttons for the programs you use most. Click
Start and All Programs and navigate to the item that
starts one of the programs you use most. Hold down
the CTRL key, drag the item to the Quick Launch tool-
bar, and release the mouse button. An icon appears on
the Quick Launch toolbar; click that icon to start the
program. Repeat the procedure for every program you
want to add to the Quick Launch toolbar.
Why would we tell you how to set up Quick Launch
after we told you how to pin programs to the Start
menu, and why would you want to use both? One
reason is that some people nd the Start menu's larger
icons and always-visible descriptions more straight-
forward than Quick Launch's smaller, textless icons.
(Note that you can display the name of the program
associated with any Quick Launch icon by holding the
mouse pointer over the icon for a second or two.)
Another reason is that Quick Launch can be more
habit-forming than pinning. You can add 10 or 12
icons to it before you know it and nd yourself short
of Taskbar real estate for your window buttons. If this
happens, consider expanding your Taskbar to a second
tier. Place your pointer on the top edge of the Task-
bar until a two-headed arrow appears, hold down the
mouse button, and drag slightly upward. (If you can't
change the size of the Taskbar, it's probably locked; to
unlock it, right-click it and uncheck Lock The Task-
bar.)