It always amuses me when I see somebody opening a Start menu -> All Programs that has like 3 or 4 columns. How can anybody find anything that way?

I usually create folders within my "All Programs" menu to organize things. For instance, since I install a bunch of things that are related to development, I always have a Development folder where I can find things like Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, etc.

A good way to organize the Start menu is just by opening its structure in Windows Explorer, and do it as we do with any other folders and files. To get there, right-click the Start menu, and click Explore:

From there, just create your folders and move stuff around.

It’s really funny to me how I really try to keep my "virtual" desktop organized, but still manage to keep a mess on my physical desktop. Well, I suppose I work a lot more with the stuff that’s on my computer than I do with the stuff that’s sitting on my desk.  🙂

By the way, I know that Windows Vista has an improved Start menu, but since I’m sticking with Windows XP for now.  🙂

Following the series on "how to be more productive", the free tools available at www.sysinternals.com are extremely handy. I’ll mention the ones I use more often.

ZoomIt

This one is great for anybody who does presentations (either at conference, user groups, or even for internal meetings). Sometimes it’s hard for some people to really see what the presenter is focusing on the screen, either because the fonts are not big enough, or because the presenter is talking about something that’s on the top-right corner, and the attendee is looking somewhere on the screen. For sometime I’ve tried to use the Windows Magnifier tool, but never really liked it. So ZoomIt comes to the rescue.

ZoomIt runs on the background, and whenever the presenter wants to zoom into an area of the screen, the Alt+1 shortcut will "freeze" the screen and allow the user to drag the mouse around the zoomed screen. The mousewheel can be used to zoom in or out. 

The other feature of it that I love is the one that turns the mouse pointer into a pen, so that the user can draw on the screen. So, you can zoom in a specific area, then click on the screen, and start drawing on it (say, drawing a circle around the area you want attendees to focus, or something like that). And you don’t need to zoom in in order to use the pen; you can also press Alt+2, which turns the mouse pointer into a pen, and "freezes" the screen, so that you can draw on it. This is so much better than having the speaker point to the projected screen with his hands… usually the person’s arm is not long enough to reach what’s been shown, and if it’s a big room with 4 large screens, well, pointing to just one screen does not help people who aren’t close to it. Using a tool like ZoomIt improves a lot the attendee’s experience. I’ve been receiving great feedback from people that see me presentation using this little handy tool.

Process Explorer

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like the Windows Task Manager. It usually does not give me enough information to troubleshoot problems I’m having. SysInternals’ Process Explorer is a great replacement for the Task Manager, since it gives you everything the Task Manager does, and a lot more.

Is shows the processes in a hierarchical way, so to make it easier to understand which process launch what. If the process running is a .NET assembly, it’s highlight in yellow, and you can quickly see things like how many appDomains, classes and assemblies are loaded.

Also, double-clicking on the file gives you a dialog with a lot more information, such as the .NET tab, which puts together information from the Performance Counters, so that you can see a lot more data about things like what’s loaded by the CLR, Garbage Collection activities, memory consumption, etc.

File Monitor

File Monitor does what the name implies: monitors files. You run it, set a filter on which files you want to watch (such as *.DLL), and the tool will keep listing any sort of access that occurs on files that fulfill the criteria defined.

This is great to troubleshoot a variety of problems. For instance, if you’re having security problems, you can check out what files were being accessed, and whether or not the operating system was able to open them. A few months back I was trying to run a .NET app, and I kept getting an error message that didn’t tell me a whole lot. After running File Monitor, I could see what was the last file being accessed before the application crashed, and that way I found out I forgot to deploy a third-party control with the app. 

Autoruns

This tool is great to see what programs runs when you start Windows. Every once in a while you open the Task Manager and see some files running that you have absolutely no idea what they are; for instance, TkBellExe. How can you figure out what they are, and get rid of them you can you don’t need it? Autoruns to the rescue.

The tool shows you everything that "auto runs" in your computer. You can then see that TkBellExe is the RealNetworks Scheduler, and like myself, decide to uncheck this file, so that it won’t start up automatically anymore.

When you uncheck a file, it’ll not be "uninstalled"; instead, it’s just moved to a separate folder on the Windows Registry, so that if you want to check it back in, you can always do that at any point in time.

There’s a lot more!

There is just a lot more on the www.SysInternals.com website. Make sure you check it out and you’re very likely to find other little tools that can help you a lot. There is a great DNRTV episode on the subject, where Scott Hanselman walks you through a bunch of the tools. Check it out!!

For over 6 years now I have been setting up my Windows Taskbar in a very specific way to improve my productivity. Essentially, instead of using the Taskbar as it is after installing Windows, I twist things around to be one-click away from things I use a lot. If you already master the Toolbar, maybe you shouldn’t read this post. Since I’ve seen a lot of experienced users who don’t set things up like I do, I think some people out there will still benefit from this post.

For one thing, I don’t "auto-hide" my Taskbar; it is just a few pixels-height, and I prefer to take that room on the screen and don’t have to move the mouse to edge of the screen for it show up. This is what my Taskbar looks like:

As you can see, I resize it to make it occupy two rows. On the first row, I see the typical buttons that show what applications are open:

No surprises there. Another thing I have there is the Language Bar. Most of the time I’m typing text in English, but when I’m typing something in Portuguese, I need to get some special characters in, and for that I need to change my keyboard layout, so it’s handy to have the selector sitting right there:

On the second row of the Taskbar, I add a few more toolbars. In order to get more of the built-in toolbars, all you have to do is to right click on the Taskbar and go to the Toolbars option:

There you can see the ones I have selected on my box (well, I’ve got almost all of them).  🙂

This is how I use them. First, the Quick Launch toolbar:

This one is pretty popular. On mine, I always put things that I really use a lot, so I like to have those options always one-click away from my mouse pointer. If I notice that there is something I haven’t been using for a while, I’ll just delete it from the toolbar, to avoid getting it too cluttered, and therefore, making it become useless. Also, if I see myself going manually to options through the Start menu, or to specific folders in Windows Explorer, I’ll drag and drop the thing to the Quick Launch so to create a shortcut to it; and when I’m done using the thing, I’ll just remove it.

Next on my list is the Desktop toolbar. I use it to get quick access to anything that’s sitting on my desktop. That includes both shortcuts as well as things like My Documents, My Computer, etc. I use this a lot to navigate to places directly without having to open up Windows Explorer:

Next, the Address bar. This bar will open the associated application with whatever you type in there. So, if you type in a UNC path, it’ll open Windows Explorer and navigate to that path; if you type in the path to a .doc file, it’ll open the document in MS-Word; if you type in a URL, it’ll launch your default web browser and navigate to the path. You got the idea. So I use a lot copying the path from somewhere (like when I get the path to a file in Visual Studio, for instance), pasting it in the Address bar and hitting GO. Much, much quicker than painfully navigating to places through the Start menu or Windows Explorer. Also, the address bar keeps the history of the last things you’ve gone to, so that sure comes in handy as well.

Finally, the Windows Search Deskbar, to quickly search for something:

Notice I didn’t mention the Links toolbar. That toolbar lists the Links I have defined in Internet Explorer; I’ll probably be phasing it out of my options since I prefer SlickRun to launch URLs like that. To a certain extent, SlickRun also replaces the Address bar, even though I still like the Address bar’s option to display a dropdown with the history.

Notice that, in order to set up your Taskbar, it takes some trying, clicking on the handles to the toolbar and moving it around:

Once you’re done resign and setting up your bars, make sure to lock it, so that you don’t mess things up by accident (just right-click the Taskbar and select "Lock the Taskbar"):

Experiment, and see if that works for you too. 🙂