Windows Me Annoyances

Tweaking the Interface

If you’ve made it this far, odds are that you already know how to change your desktop wallpaper, create shortcuts on your desktop, and rearrange the items in your Start Menu. The following solutions allow you to customize some of the more subtle aspects of the Windows interface, using methods somewhat less obvious than those found in ordinary dialog boxes.

Probably the most important customizations in this section are illustrated in Section 2.2.1 and Section 2.2.6. Both of these solutions utilize built-in features of the operating system in ways for which they weren’t necessarily intended. The rest of this section should help you tame the Tray, the Control Panel, and the Start Menu—stuff you won’t find in the manual.

Force Explorer to Start with the Folder You Want

There are several ways to open an Explorer window, but the most direct method is to use the Windows Explorer shortcut in the Start Menu. This has the same effect as selecting Run in the Start Menu and typing explorer.exe. That is, the Explorer application is run without any command-line arguments.

When Explorer is run without any arguments, it opens to its default location, the Documents shortcut on your desktop (even if you’ve deleted the Documents icon from your desktop). You may want to have Explorer open to a custom folder each time, saving the time required to repeatedly navigate through all the folders on your hard disk.

Launch Explorer from a shortcut

The following steps show how to modify ...