How launch item by first letter from Start menu?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rick
  • Start date Start date
R

Rick

In Win2k I used to choose an item from the Start menu by pressing its
first letter, but that seems to not work in Vista. E.g. I have Notepad
on my start menu. If I press 'N', hoping to load up Notepad, Vista
seems to do a search of all available programs that have an 'N' in their
name and show me that list! Is there a way to do what I want in Vista?
Thanks much.
 
Not unless you go back to the Classic Start menu. Windows 2000 never had the
XP or Vista two pane Start menu. Right click your Taskbar click Properties >
select Start Menu > select Classic Start menu radio box and click OK.

Have you tried Clicking Start > All Programs in Vista then press 'N'? I
think the hierarchial tree has disabled previous functionality in Vista.
 
Great; thanks; I hadn't known about the option to go back to a Classic
Start menu and I'm definitely more comfortable with that.

I'd use your second technique below but I prefer to rely on the keyboard
rather than the mouse and it seems that launching 'All Programs' in the
two-pane Start menu does require a mouse-click. Is there a keyboard
shortcut to launch that?
 
Rick said:
In Win2k I used to choose an item from the Start menu by pressing its
first letter, but that seems to not work in Vista. E.g. I have Notepad
on my start menu. If I press 'N', hoping to load up Notepad, Vista
seems to do a search of all available programs that have an 'N' in their
name and show me that list! Is there a way to do what I want in Vista?
Click to expand...

open the start menu, type the first 3 letters of "notepad" word: "not" and
hit Enter.
Windows Vista has the Instant Search in the start menu i.e. find as you
type, launch as you type. This is much better.
 
Hi -- thanks much but this doesn't seem to work for me. It's the menu
item for Notepad that I manually put on my Start menu that I want to
launch. I thought your technique might work for finding Notepad
wherever it is, so I typed 'NOT' into 'Start Search'. I'm not sure what
I'm seeing -- many items grouped into 'Programs', 'Favorites and
History', 'Files' and 'Communication' with four or five items under each
category -- but no Notepad among them, and the items seem to not contain
the string 'NOT' in them at all.

I guess the days of accessing top-level Start menu items by first-letter
are over. The default Vista Start menu completely ignores first-letter
 
Rick said:
Hi -- thanks much but this doesn't seem to work for me. It's the menu
item for Notepad that I manually put on my Start menu that I want to
launch. I thought your technique might work for finding Notepad
wherever it is, so I typed 'NOT' into 'Start Search'.
Click to expand...

you're an idiot,
type: not (lowcase word)
upcase word is used for negative boolean operator
 
BillD said:
you're an idiot,
type: not (lowcase word)
upcase word is used for negative boolean operator
Click to expand...

Whether I type 'not' or 'NOT' the result is exactly the same -- the same
display of Grouped items that seem to have nothing to do with 'not'.
When I then hit Enter after *either*, they both load up Backup and
Restore Center for some reason.

No Notepad to be found.

Please don't call me an idiot.
 
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