How launch item by first letter from Start menu?

[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.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

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.

 

[Rick]

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?

 

[Guest]

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?

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.

 

[Rick]

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

 

[Guest]

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'.

you're an idiot,
type: not (lowcase word)
upcase word is used for negative boolean operator

 

[Rick]

you're an idiot,
type: not (lowcase word)
upcase word is used for negative boolean operator

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.