Spending some time at my parent’s house this evening. It’s been good to relax with my brothers all in town celebrating Mother’s Day and having dinner together. Normally I’m over here for computer support. Today while I was here I’m following up on an issue from last time.

Dad’s got some weird stuff going on with his computer. Odd, random shut-downs, no-Internet connections will work, and it won’t recognize USB drives anymore. It’s been getting slower and slower, so I’m suggesting a complete wipe of the hard drive and refresh of the system to factory specs. This may seem extreme, but after recently doing this for my own laptop after 3 years of use, I was impressed with how snappy things perked up.

The question then becomes for my dad to review his system and then catalog what applications he really needs and uses on the desktop. I suggested for him to review the programs that are installed and listed in the Add/Remove programs. The next step is to review what programs are listed in the Start > Programs menu.

After making a list of the applications he uses and needs to have reinstalled, he needs to find all the program installation discs for those applications. This is a helpful task to undergo whether or not you’re preparing for disaster or a scheduled recovery and reboot.

The b5 Tech Channel is having a little them post series and I thought of something that might be pretty interesting to share with everyone and we’ll get some responses back in the comments as well.

What’s in your Start Menu?

You’ve got the ability to pin a program you use frequently to your Start Menu so it’s readily available as soon as you need it right? The question is, what did you pin up there? Are you the type of person that keeps it simple and sparse, or do you load everything up there?

As you can see from my screen shot there to the right, I’ve got a few different programs arranged. Most of them are organized by usage group and frequency of use. Most frequently used programs are closer to the bottom.

Here’s what I’ve got going:

• IIS 6.0 Manager
• Viewpoint
• Crystal Reports 9
• Outlook 2007
• Word 2007
• Excel 2007
• Firefox
• Dreamweaver 8
• Fireworks MX 2004
• IrfanView 4.0
• SnagIt 8.0
• TextPad
• SQL Management Studio 2005
• Windows Live Writer
• Visual Web Developer Express 2008
• Skype

What do you have in your Start Menu? What could you not live without?

I’ve been thankful lately to be working from multiple monitors at home and at the office. One little snag I’m experiencing though with getting work done is that I frequently find myself moving to the bottom of the secondary monitor’s screen to switch to another application, or open a new application.

The problem is that the Start Menu and task bar is located at the bottom of the other screen. It would be nice if the task bar could duplicate itself on both screens if you wanted it to function that way.

Anyone else think that would be helpful?