The Windows 95 Start menu has become something of a modern day icon. It baffled novices with the inclusion of Shut Down - "You mean I go to the Start menu to stop the computer?" - but more importantly it gave users easy access to applications and files as one of the core improvements offered by Windows 95. There are two sets of improvements made to this part of the system, the first are ones that came with IE4 and the second are new tweaks added by Windows 98.

IE4 added new bars to the main task bar at the bottom of the screen, and allowed users to move and customise the new Address, Quick Launch and Desktop toolbars. These provide single-click access to programs, documents, folders and other objects on your local system and the Internet. IE4 added one special new toolbar, the Links bar, which is similar to the Quick Launch bar but can also appear as an integral part of the IE4 browser/explorer window. You are not limited to the supplied toolbars and can create your own too.

IE4 added a Favorites item, which opens cascading menus into your IE 4 Favorites folders, and updated the Find menu with more enhanced options for quicker local drive searching. An additional tweak is the ability to re-order Start menu items by dragging and dropping.

It changed the name of the Taskbar menu item in the Settings menu to Taskbar & Start menu but did not and still does not actually give you access to all the options for the Taskbar. This menu item simply opens the properties for the taskbar and the Start menu, the same as right clicking on the taskbar and selecting Properties in Windows 95. In order to enable/disable the toolbars in the taskbar you have to right click in the toolbar and choose the cascading menu. Here you can tick/untick the toolbars, but they are not included in the taskbar properties opened from the Settings menu.

	Folder Options However, it does also add in the Folder Options item that opens a dialog in which you can choose the Classic style of UI, which means that Windows 98 looks very much like Windows 95. The alternative is the Web style that IE4 wanted people to favour, created by Microsoft after tests with members of the public who found the idea of single clicking easier than double clicking. Essentially this makes much of the interface behave like a web page (not surprising as the file windows are actually HTML pages now) so that the pointer turns to a hand if it hovers over a folder or file for you to click on - reminding you, in case you didn't know, that you can open it. As with hyperlinks in HTML pages the web view means that you only single click on the folder/link to open it. It represents a shift in the Windows metaphor towards the HTML view, but has not proved popular with many users in the real world and was therefore removed from being the default option in both IE4 and Windows 98.
	You can choose a hybrid of these by selecting the third option, Custom. This has a Settings button that opens a second dialog. Within this you can choose whether to see folders that have HTML content (which is all of them as Windows 98 uses a default one for windows that don't have a custom one). You can enable the Active Desktop, change between single and double clicking and choose between opening folders in the same window or opening a new window. See also Customising your folder view backdrop
	The View tab allows you to change the details of general folder views, like whether to see hidden files or not - IE4 does this very well by showing hidden files greyed out so they are visible and accessible, but you know instantly that they are "hidden". This folder option dialog is also available from the browser/explorer menu item View\Folder Options. Opening it from there allows you to change the view options for that single folder. Wherever you open it from, you can make changes to the view options and then apply them to all folders so they are the default options by clicking on the Like Current Folder button. You can reset the choices to the system defaults by clicking on the Reset All Folders button.
	The last tab on the Folder Options dialog allows you to change the File Types, which are the associations made between data files and applications. For example a Word file appears with a Word icon because the .Doc file format is associated with Word. It is in this dialog that you can change those associations so that different applications open a given file type. This is the same concept as is used under Windows 95, but IE4 added a new look to the interface and added in a few options. Only use this option if you are familiar with the way Windows associations work.

The last addition to the Settings menu is the Active Desktop item. This allows you to quickly change your Active Desktop settings so that it displays the HTML content and also opens the Web tab on the Display settings from Control Panel.

Find Menu The Find menu remains substantially the same though it has an additional item for finding files from the Internet. This simply opens a WWW search engine page over the WWW, so is really just a link to an HTML page. The other, more useful change is to the Find Files menu item. Under Windows 95 you could only search individual drives, but with IE4 you can search your document folders (the My Document folder that is the default save folder for Word files) and the Desktop. You can also search all local hard drives in one go rather than having to have individual searches on each drive performed - the other advantage being that all found files are displayed in one go. As you can see from the picture on the left, you can also choose to search any Infrared devices in range. This is because of the way Infrared is added into My Computer as a new device.

Re-ordering Start menu items

The Start menu now has drag and drop capability, so you can pick up an icon from the Desktop and move it over the Start button to open the Start menu, then drag it to wherever you want and drop it. Whether the file you are dragging is Shortcut or a real file, a shortcut to it will be created automatically. You can place the item wherever you want in the Start menu and it will remain exactly there. By extension you can also pick up Shortcuts that already exist in the Start menu and drag them around it to different places or even back off the Start menu to create a Shortcut off the Start menu from a Shortcut that is on it. The Programs menu item and sub menus ar no longer restricted to a folder/item order. They can be dragged into the order you want, so if you want a particular folder or file at the top of the Programs menu, move it there by dragging and releasing. The items are also now available as right clicks so you can delete them easily too without having to open the Settings for the Start menu and going to the Advanced tab as you do under Windows 95. This is made even more useful if you use the Target menu addition available from the PowerToys enhancements as you can quickly get to the real file or even operate on the real file directly from the Start menu.

Windows Update

The Windows Update item in the Start menu is similar to the Find on the Internet addition to the Find menu, except it has the potential to be one of the most useful new features. Like Find... it is simply a link to an HTML page hosted on Microsoft's site. It asks if you are happy to let your PC send information about the hardware and software on your PC. As long as you are, Windows Update can check the list against its own database of drivers and patches to ensure that you are running all the latest versions. The system is not fully working yet and more software is going to have to be added before it can be considered anywhere near useful or complete, but when that happens you will no longer have to go searching for updates to your display drivers or for that 0.01 upgrade to your image editor that fixes that annoying bug, because you'll be able to just tell your PC to update itself. The Windows Update is really a completed version of the IE4 Software updater that enabled it to patch itself, although Microsoft has yet to release an update that way. One other thing is sure and that's that Microsoft asking people to send details of their hard drive willingly is going to have the conspiracy theorists up in arms about possible privacy breaches. See also Web Help

Help

The Windows help file has been re-created in HTML and a customised Windows Help browser is now used to give you access to all the topics. This change is in line with Microsoft's overall strategy to move the OS and programs towards a WWW-type integration where users only have to get used to one type of interface to access any information, be it files, text, local or web based. In functionality the system remains similar with Contents, Index and Search (type a topic and press return and a list of relevant topics are displayed in the topic pane), though it no longer needs to create the initial database as in Windows 95. You choose the topic you are interested in from the left pane by double clicking on one and it is displayed in the right pane. Related Topics are still available as links at the bottom of the HTML page. See also Windows Help

Animation

Just in case you hadn't heard about this, one of the most obvious visible changes is in the way Windows menus, including the Start menu and right button menus now appear by scrolling out. Sub menus also do this. If you want to disable this feature you can do so in the Effects tab in the Display Control Panel.

LogOff

If you have multiple users on one system, then you can set it up to use different settings for each user. In this case the users all have separate user names and passwords. This is not a security system; it is purely for allowing individual customisation of the Windows 98 system for different users on a single system. This item in the Start menu appears above Shut Down and allows you to log off one user and log on again as a different user without having to re-start Windows. When you do this the settings for the Start menu, wallpaper, etc are removed as if the system is shutting down and then a new user name dialog box is opened. On entering the next user's name and password, the settings of that user are applied. See also Users, Passwords

Shut Down

One of the invisible improvements to Windows 98 is also the speed of Shut Down. If you select Shut Down from the menu, you now get an additional option for Stand By. This actually puts the machine into Sleep mode in compliance with the OnNow initiative. See also Accelerated boot time