Windows Tips

Fine-Tuning Find

Is there a way to modify the contents of my Find menu under the Start menu?

Jared Miller, Melbourne, Florida

The Start menu in a standard version of Windows has several submenus--Documents, Settings, and Find--that you can't customize. If you download Microsoft's free Power Toys utility, however, you can get around this limitation.

Add FindX to your bag of tricks. The FindX Power Toy creates a Find folder in your Start Menu folder; almost anything you put inside will appear on your Find menu when you choose Start, Find. You can add shortcuts to files, folders, applications, or Web sites. Although Microsoft never supported this utility and has not updated it for Windows 98, I've had no problem using it in any 9x version. Unfortunately, it does not work in Windows 2000.

You can download FindX or the entire Power Toys collection from FileWorld or from Microsoft. After downloading, create an empty directory and move W95powertoy.exe into it. Double-click the directory to decompress the contents.

To install just the FindX utility (and not any of the others), simply right-click Findx.inf, choose Install, and follow the on-screen prompts. FindX creates a hidden folder named Find within the Windows\Start Menu folder. Any item you add to this new folder will appear on your Find menu. The tips below will work only if you have already loaded FindX.

Save your searches.For tight organization, keep the contents of this menu related to the Find command. For example, you might use this folder as a repository for storing saved searches. This strategy eliminates the trouble of entering some commonly used information, such as filling the "Look in" box.

To implement this solution, choose Start, Find, Files or Folders.Enter the information you'll want to reuse, typing e:\docin the "Look in" box, for example. Then click Find Now. If you want to save the findings along with the other information already entered, choose Options, Save Results. Then choose File, Save Search. When the saved search icon appears on the desktop, rename it to something useful, such as Document Searches, and move it to the Find folder in the Start Menu folder.

Put search links in the Find menu. The Find menu is also a convenient place to store links to your favorite Web search engines. To take advantage of this tip, open the Find folder in the Start Menu folder. Right-click in an empty area, choose New, Shortcut, and type the URL of your favorite Web search engine (such as www.yahoo.com or www.infoseek.com).

Create Find menu shortcuts. For expeditious keyboard access to items on your Find menu, add an ampersand (&) to the beginning of the shortcut's name. The letter immediately following the ampersand will appear underlined in the menu, which means that it is available for use as a keyboard shortcut. For example, if you create a Web shortcut and name it &PC World Online, it will appear as "PC World Online" in the menu. To access the shortcut, simply press Ctrl- Esc, type F,then P (the first key combination opens the Start menu, the F opens the Find menu, and the P starts your shortcut).