Paul Smith said:
What's stupid is the old menu which covered the whole screen in a
mess which you had to carefully navigate your mouse around.
It's only stupid if you leave it like that.
The XP menu is adaptive, meaning you can organize it any way you want.
I have mine setup with concise submenus with similar programs
organized togther that keeps it clean and tidy without covering the
whole screen. Two clicks to start any program.
Studies have shown most users didn't even use the menu and used
Windows XP's recently used programs far more often.
Of course, which is why the very first thing you see when you click
the start button is the recently used list of programs. I like that
idea and thankfully I can use small icons to get 20+ programs on the
list. I can make it more, but then the menu gets too long.
What I don't like about the new menu though, is the lack of cascading
menus and response time. Hovering the mouse takes too long to open the
Programs menu and I'd like to speed that up like I did in XP using
TweakUI to adjust the menushowdelay setting. But this behaviour is
unique to the Programs menu only - hovering over a program submenu
doesn't do anything even though I have it enabled in the properties
for the start menu (bug in RC2?). I have to click it to open the
submenu which means more mouse clicks. And if it's a menu within a
menu, I have to click again and again to open the next submenus.
To open a particular program I don't use often enough to keep on the
recently used list, I may have to click 4-5 times to start the
program - that's annoying and more stressful (think RSI) to people who
use a computer all day long like IT department techs. For example, to
run Disk Cleanup, you have to click 5 times to start it:
Click Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, click System
Tools, click Disk Cleanup.
With XP, I clicked only two times, once on the Start button, and once
on the program, and navigation wasn't any harder with the cascading
menus once organized and with a short menu delay.
I know we can use the search option to bring up programs, but that
means switching between tools, mouse to keyboard, then back to mouse,
or mouse to keyboard, arrow keys and hit enter, then back to mouse.
And the search only works if you remember what the program is called
or a part of the name. I like the integrated search feature for other
things like finding emails or documents that contain keywords, but for
menu navigation it's too slow and of no help to me.
