When Windows 8 killed the Start menu, temporarily, almost nobody liked it, except me. Microsoft tried to remedy the problem to an extent by introducing an alternative called Power user or Win+X menu. You might as well call it the secondary Start menu since Microsoft hasn’t really given an official name to it. It can be accessed by right-clicking the bottom-left corner on the taskbar, or the start-button when it was re-introduced. But of course, it’s called the Win+X menu because you can also access it using the mentioned key combination. The Power user menu has survived and made its way onto Windows 10 as well and I think that’s great. But what’s not great is that you can’t customize it, at least not without a third-party tool. Which is where the aptly named Win+X Menu Editor comes in.
The default list surely has some items that you would rather not have there and misses some that you might want to put there. It could’ve been one of the really nice ways to access your favorite stuff on your PC had Microsoft allowed users to edit this list. Luckily Sergey Tkachenko, the developer of Win+X Menu Editor, was thinking the same thing. It was created using hashlnk (created by Rafael Rivera) tool source code. By default, this menu contains three groups with administrative tools such as Task Manager, Disk Management, Control Panel and others alike. Moreover, you can also customize the Windows 10 Start Menu as well.
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How to Edit Win+X Menu with Win+X Menu Editor
- Download the tool from the download link above. You’ll get a small file named WinXMenuEditorRelease.zip.
- If you don’t have an archive program like WinRar installed, you can double-click to open the file using Windows Explorer. If you do have an archive software installed, you can open it using the installed program or right-click on the file and just extract the contents.
- Regardless of your choice above, you should have four files, one of which will be WinXEditor.exe.
- Double-click on WinXEditor.exe or right-click on it and select Open.
- To add a new item to the Win+X Menu, click on Add a program in the top left. This brings out a menu containing the following items
- Add a program – use this to add any installed program from your computer.
- Add preset > Shutdown options, Services, Paint, Calculator, Windows Media Player, Snipping Tool, and Notepad.
- Add a Control Panel item – use this to add any Control Panel item to the WinX menu.
- Add an Administrative Tools item – use this to add administrative tools from Windows.
- You can add whatever you want but don’t forget the menu already has a lot of items. You probably wouldn’t want it cluttered with all the programs you could just as easily have placed on the start menu. Consider this as a quick menu with only your most needed programs and folders.
- Which is why you might also want to remove some of the pre-included items that you don’t really use. To remove an item from the list, select it and hit Delete on your keyboard. Alternatively, you can right-click on it and select Remove. Right-clicking on a menu item gives you further options to Move the list item up or down the list, Rename it or Move to group (another group).
- When you’re ready to apply the changes you’ve made, click on the Restart Explorer button at the bottom.
Win+X Menu Editor does not warn you as you remove an item, it only warns you when you remove an entire group. So be careful while you go on removing stuff from the menu. If you ever were to remove things you did not intend to, you can manually add it back using the steps mentioned above. There’s always the Restore defaults button too in the top-right when you need it. Note that Win+X Menu Editor does not entirely remove programs or files from your PC. It simply removes the entries from the Win+X Menu.
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