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Get Windows 8’s WinX Menu in Windows XP, Vista and 7

In Windows 8 when you right-click on the lower-left corner of the screen, you open the WinX menu. The WinX menu is so called because it can be also launched by the keyboard shortcut Win+X. The WinX menu has shortcuts to some advanced system functions that are slightly out of reach, for instance, the Control Panel, the Task Manager, Device Manager, Command Prompt, Registry Editor, Computer Management etc. WinPlusX is free program that adds the WinX menu to previous versions of the OS – Windows XP, Vista and 7.

The program consist of a single portable EXE file. Once this program is up and running, you can access the WinX menu by pressing the keyboard hotkey Win+K, just like in Windows 8.

winplusx_4_0

You can also right-click on the start button to launch this menu, but this actually launches two menus – the WinX menu added by WinPlusX and the default context menu of the start button having two options (Properties and Windows Explorer). These two menus are superimposed with the latter hiding the last two entries on the WinX menu. Using the Win+X shortcut doesn’t have this problem though.

You can use this menu as an application launcher because you can customize this menu to add or xremove your own shortcuts to it. These shortcuts are saved as a simple list in an INI file in the same directory as WinPlusX. To remove entries from WinPlusX click the ‘Remove Shortcut’ checkbox and then click on the menu shortcut you wish to remove. Be sure to uncheck the ‘Remove Shortcut’ checkbox once you are done, otherwise you will inadvertently remove shortcust from the menu when you try the launch it.

[via AskVG]

Comments

  1. What a great discovery you have made!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. WinPlusX disables the right-click context menu of the Windows 7 Start Orb permanently - even if you force an additional shutdown of WinPlusX process.

    Using a system restore point you can get back the right click context menu.

    ReplyDelete

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