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Change Win Me's Places Bar

In the November 2000 issue, you explained how to customize the Office 2000 Open Dialog Places Bar. Windows Me has a seemingly identical Places Bar. How do you customize this one?

Paul Slater, Palatine, Illinois

I was about to give up on finding an answer to this problem (a Microsoft representative I consulted told me flatly that it was impossible), when reader Shaun Lyon of Studio City, California, helped me out. Microsoft's Tweak UI freeware lets you customize the Places Bar. You'll need to have version 1.33, which is available from our Downloads library.

Select Start, Settings, Control Panel and double-click Tweak UI (in Windows Me, you may have to click view all Control Panel options first). If your Tweak UI dialog box does not include three rows of tabs, it's not version 1.33.

To change the Places Bar, first click the Open tab. There you'll see a combination box for every icon that the bar contains. You can replace an icon either by selecting another choice from the pull-down menu (these are the Microsoft-approved choices) or by typing in the path to any drive or folder. A browse button would have been useful, but none is included. Click OK once you've made your change.

• See more like this:
• sysedit,
• system.ini,
• win.ini,
• msconfig,
• font,
• uninstall,
• places,
• tweak ui,
• outlook,
• newsgroup