Start menu and power plans

[hogyu]

Two questions:

1. Vista Home Premium insists on repopulating the recently used programs
list on the start menu with Welcome, IE and other programs that I haven't
started up even after I delete them one by one from the list. There are 8-9
programs, I guess, that keep appearing.

Is there any way to tinker with what appears there and what won't? I don't
know why many of these programs are popping up even though I haven't used
them. I would guess there's something in the registry, but for me that's a
scary part of Windows...

Ideally, I would like to ban all those programs from the recently used list
and also the programs I have in the quick launch toolbar. Those unneeded
programs crowd out programs that I'd like to see on the start menu.

2. Power plans: No answer to a couple of earlier queries. I find it hard to
believe that the power manager won't switch to "power saver" automatically
when I pull out the power plug on my computer and start using batteries. It
stays on high performance or balanced, chewing up battery life
unnecessarily. I'd thought of editing the battery side of those latter two
plans to throttle down power use, but then I'd have to change everything
back manually if I needed some extra power while I was running on batteries.

 

[Wally]

2. Power plans: No answer to a couple of earlier queries. I find it hard to
believe that the power manager won't switch to "power saver" automatically
when I pull out the power plug on my computer and start using batteries. It
stays on high performance or balanced, chewing up battery life
unnecessarily. I'd thought of editing the battery side of those latter two
plans to throttle down power use, but then I'd have to change everything
back manually if I needed some extra power while I was running on batteries.

if this was the case, windows wouldn't know how to switch
configurations between the existing power plan settings or the power
plan settings itself. what I do is change the advance settings on the
power plan, I do not change the plan often. why not set how your
machine operates when it is on batteries in your existing plan
settings?