Shortcuts in Microsoft Windows
Everything you wanted to know but were ashamed to ask
A shortcut is displayed in the form of an icon (small image), and
you'll see them in three places on your desktop - on the desktop
itself, on the quick start toolbar (if you have it switched on), and in
the system tray.
The desktop is the name for the open area of screen when all your programmes are closed.
What is a shortcut?
A shortcut is just a pointer to a file on your computer. They don't contain any new information, so you can create and delete them when you like.
Here's an analagy, if you want one. Its like a smart sign in a library
that points at a particular book. It alwasy points to the book wherever
you move it. This means you can throw out the sign and you still have
the book safe and sound - although you might forget where it is now.
Also, imagine you have a nifty tool to create a new sign whenever you
want one.
To demonstrate, lets create one, and delete it again. Follow this step by step;
1. Click you right mouse button on any open area of the desktop. From the menu that appears choose New and Shortcut.
2. A box appears, like this;
3. Choose Browse, and this box opens;
4. Press the little plus button next to My Computer
5. Then the + next to c:
6. then windows
7. then scroll down til you find notepad.exe (this is the programme that starts up the standard windows text programme)
8. Now hit 'next' and type in a name for the shortcut. Choose a new
name, not the default one - you can choose anything. Mine's call LOOK
HERE.
There, you just created your own shortcut. Click Click it and notepad will start up.
Now click the shortcut just once, to select it, and hit delete on your
keyboard. Choose Yes to the "are you sure" question. There, its gone.
But remember, you haven't deleted anything, notepad.exe is still there.
Check it out in windows explorer if you don't believe it.
The Quick Start Toolbar
At the top of the article I mentioned the Quick Start Toolbar, which is useful because things start up from it with a single click.
The toolbar doesn't reveal by default, even if there are things on it.
To reveal it, right-click on an empty part of the bar at the bottom of the screen, like this;
You can add things to it by dragging them from the desktop, and you can
take things off by dragging them out of the toolbar. Delete all
shortcuts from one or the other, but there's no point having them in
both places.
The System Tray
The system tray is on the bottom right of your screen, and it shows
you programmes that are running in the background - because this uses
up system memory you don't want any more than necessary in there.
In the tray here you can see, from left to right uTorrent, Tiny
personal firewall, AVG anti-virus, volume controller, smart office
keyboard, 3D sound controller and clock.
Out of these you really should be seeing an anti virus of some sort, a
firewall of some sort, the volume control and the clock. Anything else
is personal taste, but unless you know what each item is, and why it
needs to run all the time it probably shouldn't be there. Lots of
software parks itself here when you install for no good reason but its
own selfishness.
To get things out of the tray, the first port of call is to delete them
from the startup folder on your start menu. Any programme that's here
starts up whenever you switch on.
Many self starts hide themselves away in the registry though, to make life harder for you to remove them - because they're very selfish. The best way to deal with these is using the startup controller. Just download it from the link, install it, then you'll find it in control panel.
It has various tabs that show you all the things that are self
starting. Remember, all you're looking at is shortcuts, so you can
delete anything. In any case if you delete using Startup, it puts them
into the deleted folder ready to be recovered if you decide you want
them back. It looks like this.
Removing as many of these as you can will reduce your desktop clutter and improve system performance - what are you waiting for?