EXPLORING THE START MENU
Welcome back. In Lesson 1, you learned about the nuts and bolts of Windows Vista -- the various editions, the hardware requirements, and so on. In this lesson, you'll take a tour of the new Windows Vista interface and find out how the familiar features from Windows XP translate to the new operating system.
Let's start by taking a look at the Windows Vista Start menu. Like the one in Windows XP, it has two columns, and the right column contains shortcuts to popular folders and features. The first thing you probably notice in the right column in Vista is that the names of most of those popular folders and features have changed. The word "My" has been removed in most cases, for example, so My Computer becomes Computer, My Documents becomes Documents, and so on. Figure 2-1 shows the Vista Start menu.
On the left side of the Start menu are two sections. The upper portion consists of shortcuts that have been "pinned" to the Start menu so that they're permanently available there. You can pin any shortcut there by dragging it into the section. The lower portion consists of shortcuts for recently used programs. This list updates constantly as you use different programs.
To pin an item to the upper-left part of the Start menu, right-click its shortcut (elsewhere on the Start menu) and select Pin to Start Menu from the menu that appears.
The real difference in the Start menu, however, comes when you start looking for programs on it. Clicking All Programs in Figure 2-1 displays the menu shown in Figure 2-2. Notice that no fly-out submenu is visible. Instead, a list of top-level folders and shortcuts appears. You can click any of these folders to expand their contents. For example, in Figure 2-2, HyperSnap 6 has been expanded.
