In my last post I vented out some Vista complaints I had. One of those was how Microsoft changes the Start Menu with every version of Windows. In fact, after writing that I did a personal protest and changed the properties of the Start Menu to use the Classic Start Menu, which is the same one we had with Windows 2000. I was very pleased with what I had done.

But I quickly realized how much I actually use the new Start Menu’s search feature. In fact I use it so much that I switched back and now I officially recant my complaint on Vista’s Start Menu based on that feature alone.

This is why it is so cool: not only can you search for stuff on your Start Menu, you can directly launch stuff from there. For example, type calc and press Enter and the Windows Calculator comes up.

Even better, you don’t have to type the whole thing, just enough for it to be unique. In the case of Calculator, just the letter C is enough.

Even better, the search box automatically gets focus when you open the Start Menu, so you can just start typing.

Even better, since most keyboards nowadays have a Start button that brings up the Start Menu and gives it focus, you can hit that button while in any application and do a search without ever moving your hands from the keyboard.

So if I want to open MS Word, I can hit the Start button, type the letter W, hit Enter and Word launches. Three keystrokes to access most of my applications. I’d say that’s worth a recant.

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